Just Around the Corner

Just Around the Corner Talks given from 1/5/79 to 31/5/79 Darshan Diary CHAPTER 1 1 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Audito...

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Just Around the Corner

Talks given from 1/5/79 to 31/5/79 Darshan Diary

CHAPTER 1

1 May 1979 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Hans means God’s gracious gift, Ananto means infinite. The full name will mean God’s infinite gracious gift. Life has no beginning and no end. It is eternity, and that is God’s gift. God has given himself in the gift, because life is God. All that is needed is a certain awakening in your heart so you can see it, feel it, taste it, touch it. The gift has been waiting and waiting for you for thousands of years, but you have been asleep, as everybody has been. Sannyas has to become an awakening. Sannyas has to be nothing but a great effort to wake yourself up. Nobody else can do it for you. If you don’t cooperate there is no possibility. Somebody can shake you but you can go on sleeping, you can turn over. Somebody can shake you but you can start dreaming that somebody is shaking you. Unless you want to wake up, unless an intense longing to wake up arises in you, no possible help can be given from the outside. But if you want to be awakened then all possible help is available. I am here just to help you if you desire so. It cannot be imposed on you; your freedom cannot be interfered with. With your cooperation the thing is very simple... so simple that I say: Snap your fingers, slap your face, and wake up! But if you are not cooperating then it is the most impossible thing in the world; then nothing can be done. Sannyas is your gesture that you are willing, that you will cooperate, that you will not resist. that is the inner sannyas: non-resistance, no conflict with the Master, a tremendous surrender and trust.

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Anand means blissful, Siegfried means peaceful victory or victorious peace. Your full name will mean blissful, peaceful victory. The victory can be blissful and peaceful only if it is through love, and the victory can be blissful and peaceful only if it is not over others but over yourself. To be victorious over oneself is a very delicate art, because the victory has to be without conflict. That’s the delicacy of it. If you start fighting with yourself you will never be victorious because you will remain divided against yourself. The defeated part will wait for its time to take revenge, and the victorious part becomes tired sooner or later. In remaining victorious it becomes tired, and the defeated part, sooner or later, because it can rest, becomes powerful. It overthrows the victorious. Real victory is never through conflict; it is always through integration. One has to become very very one; one has to collect oneself together. Everything has to be accepted and absorbed – anger. sex, greed, jealousy. All have to be absorbed so that you can become one piece. And to become one is to be victorious, is to be blissful, is to be peaceful – and that is the space in which God descends. God is not for beggars. It is not for the defeated ones. It is for those who are emperors, it is for those who are victorious. Anand means bliss, Ami means nectar – the nectar of bliss. That is our search, that is everybody’s search. Even trees and animals and birds are groping for the nectar of bliss – unconsciously, in darkness, but the groping is the same. And all men are groping: the good and the bad, the sinner and the saint; the search is the same. It is the search that unites us with the whole of existence, and the search is for a state of ultimate bliss – a bliss that will never end, a bliss that will never know any death. Hence I call it the nectar of bliss. Once it is found, it is found forever. It can be found; and it is not far away either; it is very close by. Even to say it is close by is not right, because it is exactly what you are: it is your very being. Discover it... go in! [The new sannyasin says: I’m not sure that all of me wants to be here, that all of me wants to be a sannyasin. That is natural, that is natural. Never ask the impossible from yourself. Those demands are violent. Even if your major part wants to be here, that’s enough... and I will seduce you slowly more and more! (laughter) Nothing to be worried about. Accept that part also that does not want to be here, because that too is you. And that other part is also important, very significant. It gives meaning to your yes. Your no gives meaning to your yes. Your no becomes the definition of your yes. The part that resists becomes the background of your surrender and trust. The darkness is not against light; in fact the light comes loud and clear when it is dark. Hence we can only see stars in the night, not in the day. They are there in the day too, they don t go anywhere, but the background is not there, the darkness is not there. As the night comes and darkness comes, stars start appearing. In fact to say that they start appearing is existentially wrong. They have always been there, but they start appearing to our eyes because the darkness gives the background. Just Around the Corner

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And my approach is not to deny anything, but to use everything. So I will also use that part which does not want to be here. I will not create a conflict in you. I will bridge both the parts, and when the opposites meet, great harmony arises. That part can be cut but then you will not be so rich. Your yes will be a little poorer because it will come out of helplessness, because you cannot say no. But you can say no and yet you are saying yes. Your yes has significance, validity. It is coming in spite of the no, hence it is valuable. Anand means bliss, Teresa means a reaper, a harvester. Your full name will mean a reaper of bliss. That’s what sannyas is all about. The seeds are there, the season is there, because it is always the season. The soil is there, the sun and the rains – everything is available. All that is needed on your part is to sow the seeds, to drop the seeds in the soil so that they can disappear into the dark womb of the earth. Soon the seeds will be gone but the plants will arrive, and it will not be long before the reaping season comes. But people don’t take the first step, hence they go on missing. They are afraid of dropping the seeds in the soil. The fear is: ”Who knows? – the seeds may be lost, they may never become plants.” That risk has to be taken, that courage is a must, and that trust is needed. The farmer trusts. He drops the seeds that he has for something that may come, may not come. But it always comes: it is bound to come. Existence responds with great love. If you trust, existence trusts you. If you are ready to die, existence helps you to resurrect. Anand means bliss, Helen means the bright one, the lightful, the luminous. Bliss is luminous. You cannot hide it. It expresses, manifests itself, in a thousand and one ways. It sings, it dances, it creates. The blissful person cannot be lost in the crowd. You can see and find him amidst thousands, because he has a totally different vibe. When others are just dark, he is full of light. He is a lamp unto himself. His heart is no more empty: the flame from the beyond has descended into him. Let it not only be your name, make it your existence. It simply indicates your potentiality, everybody’s potentiality. There is no need to live in darkness. Everybody is born to live in light as light, and we have to claim our right. [A sannyasin who is leaving says he feels restless but can’t say why.] Mm mm. It will be good if you can come back, mm? – because you need some work. It is good to work now so that this restlessness can be finished. Restlessness is just energy which is boiling within, and you have not yet been able to find the right creative channelization for it. Restlessness is only symptomatic. It simply shows that there is unused energy. All that you need is a creative direction. So just come and be here longer, mm? – and soon your energy will find the right direction. And once the energy starts moving in the right direction great rest arises. Not that you become inactive; in fact Just Around the Corner

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just the opposite happens: when you feel restful you can act tremendously, because all your energy is available for action. When you are restless, in restlessness, your energy becomes entrapped. In restlessness you dissipate energy. If it becomes a habit it is one of the most dangerous things to happen – but it happens in the majority. My own observation is: unless a person finds a creative manifestation for his being he remains restless. At the most he can repress restlessness, console himself, remain occupied with some nonsense; but that is not the right way. That is wasting such precious energy that we cannot regain in any other way. [Another sannyasin who is leaving says: I wondered if we could be close in Europe.] Mm mm. (a pause) Every night meditate before you go to sleep, and while you are falling asleep, just go on remembering me... not verbally, just the face, just the idea. Soon a communication with the unconscious will start, and you will be as close as you are here, or even more.


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CHAPTER 2


Prem means love, Gudrun means divine wisdom. Wisdom is not knowledge. It has nothing to lo with knowing. It is a feeling, and ultimately it is being. These are three planes: knowing, feeling, being. Knowing is the most superficial, feeling is in the middle, and being is at the very core. Ultimately wisdom is being, but in the beginning it is feeling, moving towards being. But it is never knowing, it is not knowledge. Hence love is the door to divine wisdom. Love means the purest feeling, the purity of he heart – not logic; logic leads you into the head. Love leads you into the heart, and the heart is the door to divine wisdom. And it is wisdom that liberates. It is coming to your own ultimate being that becomes freedom and bliss and benediction. Sat means being, Takeshi means wide and great. Man looks small but he is not: he contains infinities n him. He contains the whole sky, and all the oceans and all the stars. Man is a universe in imself – it is just that we are not aware of our own strength. The day you become aware of it, the day of rejoicing has come. Sannyas is initiation into your own inner richness. I am here to acquaint you with yourself. I cannot give you anything, because in the first place you don’t need anything, and in the second place truth cannot be given. The moment truth is uttered it becomes a lie, but truth is already in you. My function is to persuade you, seduce you towards your own heights and your own depths. The moment you start listening to your own soundless music then life has wings. Then you are not confined, then nothing confines you. Then this whole universe is yours. And that has to be claimed; it is our inheritance. Jesus calls it the kingdom of God, but again and again he also says: It is within you. It is absolutely unbelievable that you can contain the great truth, that you can contain Cod in you. I know the mind 6

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cannot believe it, but believe it or not, it is so. And it is not a question of belief, it is a question of inquiry. Let sannyas become a great inquiry into your own depths, and you will come upon treasures and treasures which are inexhaustible. Anand means bliss, Arthur means strong, brave, courageous, valorous. Bliss is available only to those who are ready to risk all. Without risking all that you have, you cannot attain to God. There is no possibility of reaching God half-heartedly. One cannot grow in a lukewarm way. You have to be intensely thirsty, you have to be on fire, only then can you evaporate. And when the ego has evaporated, God enters in, and with God bliss comes as a shadow, peace comes as a shadow. They are all companions of the experience of God. God never comes alone: it comes in a great company of all the virtues, of all that is good and beautiful and lovely. But to attain to that great wealth, to that ultimate treasure, you cannot go half-heartedly, you cannot hold yourself back. You have to be courageous. You have to take the jump into the dark. You have to risk the known for the unknown. And that’s what sannyas is all about: preparation to risk all for God. Siegfried means victorious peace, and Deven means God. It is the victory of peace that leads you to God. One lives in noise. I don’t mean the outer noise but the inner: the constant inner talk, the chattering mind that always keeps you in a state of delirium, a kind of insanity. It is so much that you cannot hear the still, small voice of your being. One has to pacify the mind, one has to be victorious over the mind. And the way to victory is not through fighting the mind but through understanding it, by watching it, by observing it, by being absolutely non-judgmental about it – neither thinking good nor bad about it, but creating a distance. That’s the art of being victorious: creating a distance between your mind and yourself, seeing it far away, farther and farther away, seeing it as separate, seeing it as a scene and yourself as the seer, and becoming more and more alert about the seer, and less and less alert about the scene. Slowly slowly the emphasis shifts and your consciousness is freed from the seen and becomes available to the seer. That moment is the moment of victory, and that moment is also the moment of the entry of God in you. Peace and God come together You prepare for peace and God comes as a gift.


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CHAPTER 3


Prem means love, Laurel is a symbol of two things; one is victory, the other is immortality. Love brings both: it brings victory, it brings immortality. Love is the only experience in which defeat is impossible because the very first requirement of being in love is to be surrendered. If a person is surrendered how can he be defeated? He has accepted defeat himself – how can you defeat him? And that is love’s secret of victory: it cannot be defeated. And love is also the only experience in life which gives you some glimpse of immortality, of deathlessness – only glimpses, but those glimpses are of tremendous importance. The whole of life will be changed through them. It is through love that you feel that you are not just the body but something more. It is through love that you become aware of your spirit. It is through love that you become aware that time can be transcended, and time transcended is death conquered. Prem means love, Sergio means to serve. Service can be without love; it can be just a duty, one has to fulfill it. One’s heart is not in it; it is not one’s joy. Maybe there is some motivation of some rewards later on, in this life or in the other, but the act of service in itself is joyless unless it arises out of love. Service should not be done according to religious commandments. It should not be made a virtue. It should be a consequence of a loving person, a natural fragrance of love; no effort should be made for it. Only then does it have beauty. When it arises out of love with no motivation, with no end in view there is great benediction. And those are the moments when God is the closest. Service cannot be Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan: it can only be loving. Anything to say to me?

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[He replies: Many things but I don t feel able to express them.] There is no need. I understand them without you ever saying them. I go on answering you without you ever questioning. All that is needed on the part of the disciple is to be silent and awaiting. Whenever anything is needed, it will be given. If it is not needed, only then is it not given. Questioning is not of any relevance. Communion is needed, and that’s what sannyas is for. It is not a communication but a communion; it is not a dialogue but a meeting of two hearts. Nothing needs to be said! Anand means bliss, Jose means a gift of God. Bliss is not through effort, it is through God’s grace. You cannot achieve it, you can only receive it. The achieving mind is one of the barriers in finding bliss. The achieving mind has to cease for bliss to be. In the world, everything is achieved through effort, but in the inner world, in the world of God, everything is afforded, achieved through non-effort. It is simple but not easy. It is simple because nothing has to be done, but it is not easy because we have become so accustomed to doing. From the very childhood we start telling children: Don’t sit there – do something! If you want to go in you will have to learn just the opposite rule: Don’t do anything – just sit there! This is your name: Swami Prem Kalli. Prem means love, and have you invented Kalli yourself, from Karl? [KALLI: Yes.] Good! Karl means strong, manly, brave, but in Hindi Kalli has a far more beautiful meaning: it means the mother goddess. It is just the opposite of the German – not manly but womanly. Strong certainly, but a totally different kind of strength; the feminine strength. You have changed Karl to Kalli; now completely forget about the origin. Now let it become mother goddess. Each man is both man and woman, and each woman is both woman and man, and we have to come to a deep merger of these two elements. In that merger is strength, is power; immense power is released. It is far more significant than the power released by an atomic explosion. It is not the power of explosion but the power of implosion. The atom has to be broken, then it releases energy, but in the inner world man has to be integrated – not broken, not split, but centered, crystallized – then power is released. The man and the woman inside have to meet and merge, so let Karl and Kalli meet and merge and become one. And that happens through love. When you love a woman it is not only the woman on the outside that you love, in a vicarious way, in an indirect way you love your inner woman too through her. In fact you fall in love with a woman only if she somehow resembles your inner woman, otherwise you will not fall in love in the first place The resemblance may not be too much, the resemblance may be very little and may be finished sooner or later, but there is certainly some echo. That echo is love. Something of your heart is reflected. Falling in love with a woman or falling in love with a man is really deep down falling in love Just Around the Corner

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with one’s own polar opposite. And both those poles exist in you: one is Karl, the other is Kalli; and both have to meet. And just as the child is born out of the mother, never out of the man, exactly the same happens when the man and the woman inside meet, again the man disappears into the woman. The mother is left there again. The beginning is the mother and the end is the mother. If one day you come across God you will be surprised: you will not find that he is a man, you will find that he is a woman. He is a she! Prem means love, Git means song – a love song. And that’s my message: your life has to become a love song. It has to drop being prose, it has to become poetry. It has to drop being logic, it has to become love. You have to disappear from the head and appear in the heart. It is a long dive from the head to the heart, but it is the most important thing. Nothing can be more important than this dive from the head to the heart. The head lives in a kind of hell, the head is hell, and the heart is heaven. It is not through thinking that one arrives home: it is through feeling. So think less, feel more. Anand means bliss, Verena means sacred wisdom. A few things have to be understood. One: all wisdom is sacred. That which is not sacred is not wisdom, it is knowledge, information. Wisdom is necessarily sacred because it descends from God into you. It is not part of your memory. You cannot learn it in a school, it cannot be taught to you, you have to catch it. And the way to catch it is to be utterly open to the beyond, available to the beyond. It comes dancing, it comes pouring, but it comes from the unknown. And the moment it comes it transforms you. Your life starts having a new flavor, and flavor of holiness, sacredness, purity. Sometimes that kind of atmosphere is found in a temple, an ancient temple, in a pyramid, in a mosque, in a cathedral, but rarely. But that kind of milieu starts surrounding the person in whom something of the sacred has descended. And when it comes it creates a great dance; it brings bliss. That is the indication that it has come. The scholar is serious; the wise man is blissful. The scholar is very miserly. He cannot even laugh, he cannot even smile. But the wise man can have a belly laugh. He is more playful, more like a child. Wisdom brings sacredness, innocence; it brings back your childhood with a new depth and a new richness. The child was simply ignorant, but when wisdom comes you are innocent and not ignorant. Your innocence is a knowing innocence – uncorrupted by knowledge but full of insight, vision, clarity. Deva means divine, Hanne means grace – divine grace. Depend on divine grace, trust divine grace. People trust too much in their own egos and hence they suffer. To trust in the wave is bound to bring suffering, because the wave is only a temporary phenomenon, momentary: one moment it is there, another moment it is gone. You cry and weep and do whatsoever you want to do, but it is not coming back to you. It is simply gone; it no more exists.


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Trust in the ocean and then you will never be in suffering and never be in misery, because the ocean always is. The ego is just a flux in movement. It is very illusory, exactly like ripples on the lake. When you throw a stone in the lake it creates an illusion, as if ripples are arising and those ripples are going towards the bank. Nothing is going anywhere. It is not that the first wave is going to touch the bank, no. The first wave simply waves another wave and the second waves the third. Nothing is going anywhere, although from the outside it looks as if waves are moving, as if there is great movement. Nothing is moving; movement is false. It is just that the surface is disturbed, that’s all. You can try it by dropping a piece of paper. You will be surprised: the wave goes on but the piece of paper remains in the same place. The waves cannot take it away, because they are not really going – it is just that the surface is waving. Exactly like waves, the ego is an illusion: the surface is waving. Trust the depth, and that’s what the meaning of God is: your innermost depth. If one can trust that, great grace arises in life. Everything suddenly becomes smooth, harmonious, everything suddenly fits. Just as before nothing was fitting, now everything simply fits. Life is no more a jigsaw puzzle, it becomes a tremendous harmony. And harmony is grace and grace is divine. Man can attain it too only by surrendering to the divine.


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CHAPTER 4


Veet means going beyond, transcending, Christian means a follower of Christ. Go beyond following, that’s the only way to be a Christ. Go beyond following, and that’s the only way to be a Buddha. The follower never reaches the goal. Love Christ but don’t follow, don’t imitate, don’t be a shadow, don’t be a carbon copy. Love, understand, aspire, imbibe the spirit but still don’t be a follower. That is the real way of following. Not to be a follower is the real way of following because then one day you can be a Christ on your own. And what I am saying is not against Christ, Buddha, Krishna; it’s exactly their message. Unless you are an authentic self you can never attain to the Christ consciousness or Buddha-consciousness. And to be an authentic self the first need is never to imitate, because each individual is so unique that if you repeat somebody else’s life you will only be acting; you can never be true. Yes, you can become an actor and you can act exactly the same way Buddha acted. You can walk, you can talk, you can behave in the same way – maybe even better, because you can practice it, rehearse it, but it will remain pseudo, false. The real follower never follows. He learns, he loves, he feels; he imbibes the spirit, he takes the hints. He is not a sheep – he has his own soul. And that’s the message of sannyas. By becoming a sannyasin you are not becoming my follower. You are simply entering into my friendship, into a love affair certainly, but not into a following – a love affair that will have far-reaching effects, but they will only be consequences; they will happen of their own accord. And the closer you come to me, the more you will be yourself. If I can help that only then have I been a help to you. If by coming closer to me you start losing your identity, your individuality, then I am not a friend, then I am destroying you, and I am not creating you at all. 12

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Prem means love, Samma means silence, stillness, tranquility, balance. Love can be feverish, then it is a disease. Unless it is tranquil, it is not really love: it is lust pretending to be love. The feverishness is the indication of something which is not in harmony with you. Hence true love is not feverish. It is very calm and quiet. It is not hot – neither is it cold. If you think about it in comparison with hot it is cool. If you think about it in comparison with cold it is warm. It has that double quality, warmth and coolness in it. And to attain warmth and coolness together is one of the greatest achievements in life. It is easy to move to the extremes – to become hot or cold. That’s how people move: from hot to cold, from cold to hot, from love to hate, from hate to love. They don’t know what love is. They simply go on moving from one extreme to the other. Love exists exactly in the middle. It is such a stillness, such a silence, that the lover needs no other meditation, because love in itself is enough of a meditation. That is the meaning of Samma: to be exactly in the middle, balanced, neither leaning this way nor that. And that quality has to be imbibed by each sannyasin: a calmness, a coolness, yet with warmth. It appears paradoxical but all that is great in life is paradoxical, remember that. Only meaningless things are not paradoxical. The greater the meaning, the bigger the paradox, because meaning happens only when opposites meet. And where opposites meet, paradox is bound to be there: it is a synthesis. Anand means bliss, Margaret comes from a Persian root, murwari; it means a child of light. Your full name will mean a blissful child of light. Existence is made of the stuff called light. Physics may call it electricity, electrons, neutrons, protons; it doesn’t matter. Mystics have always known it as light. We are made of light, we come from light – rays of the ultimate – and one day we have to go back to the light. To remember this, that our source and our goal is the same, is of tremendous significance, because that helps you to remain cool. That helps you to remain unburdened. It helps you not to be too attached to things, possessions, the world, because one day we have to leave. There is a famous story. One American tourist went to see a Sufi Master. He had dreamed of seeing the Master for a long time; he had been reading his books and he was really impressed. But when he went there to see the Master who was sitting in a small hut with a few books, no furniture at all, the American tourist looked around and he said ”Where is your furniture?” The Sufi Master laughed and said ”Where is yours?” The tourist said ”I am just a tourist here.” And the Sufi Master said ”So am I – just a tourist.” To always remember this – that we are just tourists here, we are not to be here forever, we come and we go, and we come from the same source to which we are going – that remembrance keeps one aloof, uncontaminated, keeps one virgin and pure. And that’s what holiness is: remaining in the world and yet not being part of it. Veet means beyond, Kammo means action. There are things which can be achieved through effort, through action, and there are things which cannot be achieved through effort, through action. The second category of things is the concern of religion; the first category of things is the concern of science. Just Around the Corner

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Science means action; religion means inaction – a deep receptivity, passivity. God cannot be achieved through action, because whatsoever we achieve through action is going to be something smaller than us. The painting cannot be greater than the painter, nor can the poetry be bigger, greater than the poet. If we achieve God by our action, that God will be just a toy, our own invention to console, to pacify ourselves; it will not be the true God. Truth can come only in a deep receptivity. One has to be feminine to receive truth. One has to be just a womb to become pregnant with God. Yes, that is exactly the way God comes, beauty comes, truth comes, meditation comes. All that is really valuable always comes through effortless receptivity. That is going to be your path: become more quiet, silent. Relax more and more into non-doing. In those moments of non-doing, when all simply stops, when thinking disappears and time too, you will have your first glimpses of that which is. God is only another name of that which is. Prem means love. Rita comes from a Persian root; it means a pearl. Love is the most precious pearl in the world. Unless a man is full of love he remains poor. He may have all the riches of the world – that doesn’t make any difference. The outer richness cannot fulfil your inner emptiness: outwardly one can be the emperor; inwardly one remains a beggar. And vice versa is possible too: if one is full of love one is an emperor inside. One may be a beggar on the outside, but when the inner is full of light, love, life, who cares about the outer? Prem is Sanskrit; it means love. Michel is Hebrew; it means godly. Your full name will mean godly love. Love is always godly, it cannot be otherwise. If it is, then it is something else masquerading as love, then it is only a mask. Hidden behind it will be jealousy, possessiveness, anger, hatred – all that is really anti-love. Love can only be godly; it can only be other-worldly. It grows in the world but goes beyond it. It is like a lotus growing out of the mud: it comes from the mud but it doesn’t belong to the mud. It starts reaching towards the heights; it starts reaching towards the sun, towards the sky. That is its real home. The lotus is trying to free itself from the mud. And that’s exactly what every human being is trying to do: trying to free himself from all that is heavy, from the very gravitation of the earth. Lust is mud, love is the lotus. I am not against the mud, because if you are against the mud you will never be able to grow lotuses. But don’t get stuck with the mud. Remember that one has to reach to the stars, that our real home is somewhere far away, far, far away, that here we are only strangers, outsiders. We are on a great pilgrimage of learning but this is not our home. This is what sannyas is all about: helping you remember the real home, creating a longing in you for the real home, stirring your heart, giving you a vision of your real home. [A sannyasin who has to leave says: How can I continue to nourish what’s happening inside me, and move into a deeper, more sensitive rapport with you?] Which meditation did you like the most [He replies: Vipassana.] Just Around the Corner

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Then continue Vipassana, and I will be available. Whenever you go in deep Vipassana, I will be there . . . [A sannyasin, recently arrived, says: I’m always very much scared and I really... I don’t know what to.] Come for a longer period, mm? Fear is there. It can be dissolved, it can be transformed; and it has to be transformed, because that is blocking your growth. But come for at least three, four months. Try, mm? – because these are things through which you may get into trouble if you start stirring them up and you have to go after three weeks. A longer period is needed so that everything can be stirred, can be thrown out, cleansed and you can settle back again on a new plane – and then you can go. Otherwise it will be just like escaping from the table of the surgeon in the middle of the surgery, and that will be difficult. This is a surgery, far deeper than the physical surgery. Everybody is carrying deep wounds, full of pus, and unless that pus is taken out and the poison is cleaned from the body, you will not be able to get free of the fear. It has entered your very blood-stream, your bones. It will take a little time, but it is good that you are aware of it. Many are more unfortunate: they are full of fear but they are not aware. On the face of it they look very brave and very courageous and very strong. That is just a facade to hide the reality. But you are true about it, and it can easily be changed; no problem is there. But next time come for a longer period.


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CHAPTER 5


Anand means bliss, Eli means light – a blissful light. The light is there, it has not to be enkindled. We bring it with us. We are made of it, it is our innermost core, but we are keeping our back to it. And because we go on keeping our back to the inner light, our life becomes dark, unnecessarily dark. We live in our own shadow then. Sannyas means a one hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, so that one can face oneself, and the moment one sees oneself, all darkness, all misery, all hell, simply disappears. It is found that it was false. It is found that it was just an illusion. It was our own shadow, and we were creating it by keeping our back to our own light. Satya means truth, Maria means rebellion. Truth is never a tradition. It is never a convention; it cannot be given by one generation to another generation. It is not conformatory. Truth is rebellion. Truth is rebellion against the social structure, the spiritual slavery, rebelling against all that is imposed on you forcibly, about which you have not taken any deci-sion of your own, to which you have not said your yes – rebelling against all that which has been created around you by the church, by the state, by the structure of the society. It is only through rebellion that one becomes an individual. It is only through rebellion that one attains to soul, that the self is born. And that self has nothing to do with the ego. The ego is a social phenomenon. It is created by conformity, convention, tradition. The ego is created by obeying all nonsense that goes on accu-mulating down the ages. The more you obey the society, the more your ego will be fulfilled. They will go on buttressing your ego: they will call you moral, spiritual, holy, saintly. They will respect you; if you are ready to bow down, they will respect you. That is a mutual arrangement: the society respects only those people who are ready to bow down to its dictates. It kills a Jesus; it worships the pope. It murders Socrates...

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To know the truth one has to learn the way of rebellion, one has to learn the art of rebellion. It is the most valuable thing to learn. It is not blind reaction. It is not destructive. It needs tremendous intelligence to be in rebellion and to be alive, to be in rebellion and not to be in unnecessary conflict. Say yes to all that is formal. There is no need to fight against it. If the society says ”Keep to the left”, then it is perfectly okay: keep to the left. If the society says”Keep to the right”, it is perfectly okay: keep to the right, because it doesn’t matter. It is just a formal law of the society – useful, utilitarian. But if the society says something for which you have to sell your soul, then be absolutely in rebellion. In ninety percent of the cases you can say yes without any compromise. Only in ten percent of cases will you have to stick to yourself. In that very sticking to yourself you become integrated. Maria is a beautiful name – let it become your life too: let it be a rebellion for truth. Prem means love, Gabriele means strong man of God or God is my strength. Love creates the space in you where God becomes your strength, because love helps you to disappear, and only in your disappearance, in the cessation of the ego, does God appear. Your absence is his presence, and his presence is strength. It is tremendous power. It is immortality, it is eternity. It is all that one can wish for. It is all that we cannot even dream of. It is utter And the moment you are not and God is, a totally different kind of power starts emanating from you. You are not the doer of it. You are no more the cause of it. You cannot claim it as yours. You are simply a vehicle, a passage, a hollow bam-boo, and the song flows through you: the song is God. [A sannyasin says: I’ve been here for months, I knew nothing about you... and you’ve changed my life. Just, thank you.] There is nothing to know. One has to forget all knowledge and all desire to know. That is truth. Truth is not an object of knowing, but when all desire for knowing disappears, whatsoever remains, that subjectivity is truth. Truth is not a content in consciousness, consciousness itself is the truth. You are the truth. Where else will you find it? It is not something outside. The knower is the known and the observer is the observed: they are the same. The desire to know creates a division; the knower and the known become separate. In that separation is our misery. That separation is our whole problem. That separation has to be completely dropped. There is no need to know, there is no need to worry about truth. Truth is perfectly okay. Things are perfectly right as they are – relax and enjoy. That is truth!


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CHAPTER 6


Gyan means wisdom, prem means love – wisdom through love. There is a knowing that is possible only through love. All other kinds of knowing are only acquaintances from the outside. Love takes you to the very inside of a thing. The scientist can say many things about a rose flower but all that is from the outside. He has never entered into the being of the rose. He has never participated in the dance of the rose. He is utterly unacquainted with the interiority of the rose. That is possible only for the poet who loves. The poet also knows but in a totally different way. He is not an observer: he knows by participation. He dances with the rose, he sings with the rose he feels with the rose. In certain deep moments he becomes the rose. That is the way of love to know, and that is the way to know God: not by knowledge but by love. Prem means love, Danny means God is my judge or God judges. The full name will mean the God of love is my judge. Everything has to be tested on the criterion of love. If it fulfils the criterion of love it is good, if it falls short it is bad. The only decisive factor in life is love. One should decide only through love and never through anything else. Nothing else really matters; only love matters. So a man of love is a moral man and a man without love is immoral. Howsoever virtuous he may try to be, without love he cannot be virtuous. His virtue will be only a pretense, his virtue will only be social respectability, a formality. It will not come from his heart, it will not be his soul. [To an Indian eye-surgeon working in America:] This is your new name, and let it also be a new birth. Sannyas is a rebirth, and unless it is a rebirth it has no meaning. One has to become discontinuous with the past. Let this be your birthday. You begin life anew, unburdened of the past, utterly open. 18

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The past becomes a closing. And the past becomes heavy and starts directing you, guiding you, forcing you, coercing you, into certain directions, into certain patterns. One should be able to die to the past every day, in fact every moment, so that one remains new, available to the new life, to the new sun, to the new moon, available to existence as it is. Carrying a past inside distorts reality and does not allow you to be spontaneous. So let sannyas be a new beginning: a death and a resurrection. This will be your new name: Swami Anand Bharti. Anand means bliss, Bharti means one who belongs to India – bliss that belongs to India. And by India I don’t mean the land, I don’t mean the geography, I don’t mean the political map. By India I mean the adventure of the Buddhas, the exploration of thousands and thousands of years into the inner world of man. India represents the inner search, the inner quest. It is a symbolic name. It has nothing to do with the politics, the history, the geography, the boundaries of a country. It has nothing to do with time and space, but it has something to do with the ultimate quest of man, the quest to know ”Who am I?” That is the only contribution that the East has given to human consciousness. Just as the West has given science, the East has given religion. And India has been the very heart of the East. Everything that has happened in the East started happening through India. And it still remains an undercurrent; it is still alive, not dead. Of course from the surface everything has disappeared. Now on the surface India is just an ugly, poor, starving country; but in the innermost core something of Buddha, something of Krishna, something of Patanjali still continues. It cannot die, it is eternal. As long as man lives on the earth that India cannot die. Wherever one is searching for God one belongs to that India. In that sense Jesus is an Indian, and so is Mohammed and so is Francis – off-shoots of the same quest, but the roots are in this country, in this part, and those roots have not died yet. Maybe the tree has been cut and you cannot see any foliage, no fruits any more, no flowers any more, but the roots are alive. My whole work here is to bring new shoots, new foliage. Those roots have to be nourished, and the whole world can be transformed. The world needs that transformation – utterly needs it, urgently needs it. There has never been such an urgency. Man will not live; if the quest for the soul is not revived man cannot live. By the end of this century we will have to decide either to commit suicide, a global suicide, or to move to a new plane of humanity, to drop all politics, to drop all nations, to drop all isms, and to create a humanity which is religious, simply religious, neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan – to create a humanity that is constantly inquiring into the ultimate. In that very inquiry one becomes transformed, one becomes luminous. Just to long for truth is enough to be transformed. Just to have a dream is enough to be transformed. A dream of God is far more real than this so-called world. A small longing in the heart is enough... just a drop of it, because it is no ordinary water, it is nectar. Let your sannyas become a great search – not a formality but an authentic quest


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CHAPTER 6.

The time has come for it. You have been groping in the dark; now there is no need to grope. I give you the light, I give you the insight. This much insight that sannyas makes available is enough. I take away all ideologies, theologies, philosophies. I simply give you a silent space from where you can function without the ego. That’s what sannyas is all about: a small space inside you where no ego exists. If one can function from that space life has a totally different flavor. Life becomes a blessing, not only to you – it is not only that you are blessed, but you become a blessing to the world too. Just that small space has to be created and each moment is a benediction. [A sannyasin who has to leave says: My heart feels like a rock most of the... for a long time. It’s just beginning to open... and I want to know how to nurture it when I go back.] It will continue to open, don’t be worried. You need not do anything in particular, because the heart is a very indirect, delicate phenomenon. If you start doing something to open it, that very doing will close it. It will be like forcing petals of a rose flower to open. That won’t help, that will destroy the flower. One cannot be direct about the heart, one has to be just indirect. One has to be very very delicate about it – not gross, very subtle. Listen to music. Go into nature whenever you can find time: be with the trees, birds, animals. Look at the stars in the night... sing, dance. These are indirect ways – you are not doing anything directly to open the heart. Be loving, be friendly, even with strangers. These are all indirect ways. This is how one can nourish the opening heart. And then come back as soon as possible, mm? Because the real opening is going to happen here! A little bit will go on happening there, but the explosion is going to happen here. And it is better that it happens here, because when the heart really opens suddenly you enter into such a new world that you almost feel insane. Then the close proximity of the Master is needed – one who can help you to pass through those few days when you feel insane. Those are just a few moments. Once you have settled on the new plane then there is no problem. Then you know for the first time what sanity is. Then you know that up to now you have been insane; now you are sane. Then the whole world looks insane. Then there is no problem; but in the beginning when the heart suddenly opens up it is such a new experience, so unknown, that one is shattered, one’s whole identity disappears, because our identity is in the head. And this is so new that it seems as if somebody else has possessed you. So go on becoming more and more sensitive and do whatsoever helps in becoming more sensitive, but don’t be direct; dance, sing, play music. And then come back! Keep it (a box) with you, and whenever you need me just put it on the heart. And help my people there – that helps you the most!


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CHAPTER 7


Prem means love, Marian means rebellion and grace. Mary means rebellion; Ann is part of Hannah, it means grace. Your full name will mean love, rebellion, grace. Love is rebellion and love is grace too. Love is rebellion because it is the expression of your innermost core. It is not imitation, it is not being a carbon copy; it is your originality. Love is always original. Your love is going to be just your love and nobody else’s. Nobody has ever loved like that and nobody will ever love like that. That is your individual flavor, that is your perfume, that is so uniquely individual that it cannot be repeated, it cannot be imitated. Hence each lover attains to individuality – only lovers attain to individuality. Love becomes the process of individuation. It is rebellion. It is rebellion against the crowd, rebellion against the mass psychology, rebellion against all those who are making an effort to destroy the individuality – the state, the church, the society. But it is not only rebellion, it is grace too. It brings a subtle beauty, it brings a tremendous splendor. It is not violent. Rebellion it is, but it is non-violent, it is very graceful. It is love rebellion. Begin with love and end with grace, and it is rebellion which bridges the two. But every step has to begin in love and every journey has to end in grace. Grace is the ultimate benediction. Grace means that God has arrived. Grace means that one is fulfilled. The tree has come to blossom. The song has been sung. The river has reached the ocean. Anand means bliss or blissfulness, Silvio is the Latin god of the woods, the god of the woods and the forest. Your full name will mean a blissful god of the woods. Nature is the only proof of God. Whatsoever man has made gives no indication of God. The great cement structures, the bridges, the railways, the airplanes – the great technology that surrounds us 21

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today gives no hint that God exists. It makes us feel as if we are the creators and there is no other creator. But when you go to the mountains, to the sea, to the woods suddenly you become aware of a totally different reality, not manmade. And it is not only that it is not manmade, it has a totally different dimension to it: it grows. The ocean goes on breathing, waves are its breath. The forest is alive, it grows: the trees are growing and the birds are alive and the animals are alive. Whatsoever man has made is dead, it does not grow. And only something growing can make you aware of the presence of life. Growth is life. If you can feel life pulsating, God is not far behind. To feel life is to enter into the temple of God. Go more and more into nature. Go more and more into something that is God-made and which man has still not destroyed, because it is there that God is still alive. Friedrich Nietzsche says ”God is dead.” It is true: in New York he is dead, in Bombay he is dead, in London he is dead, in Berlin he is dead; but not in the woods, not in the Himalayas, not in the oceans and the rivers and not in the clouds and the stars. There God is very alive, as alive as ever. We have just to open our eyes towards nature more and more. Let nature be your meditation. Anand means bliss, Arupa means formless, limitless, infinite. Bliss has no form because it is not a thing; it is an experience. Bliss has no boundaries because it is not a phenomenon of the mind; it happens in the unbounded soul. Bliss is another name of your inner sky. It is infinite, beginningless, endless, with no form, with no definition, in fact with no name at all. We call it bliss because some name has to be given to it. One can call it God, one can call it truth, one can call it enlightenment – they all mean the same thing. They all indicate the indefinable, the indescribable. And that is the goal. Sannyas is a movement from the form to the formless, from the definable to the indefinable from boundaries to no boundaries. Sannyas is another name of total freedom. [A sannyasin says: When I was sitting in Buddha Hall one morning, you passed in the car, and you had a beautiful expression on your face. I heard the words ”Comfort ye my people.” and it was later that I realized that they were Christ’s words.] That’s... absolutely true. But it will go on happening more and more, even there. Once a window opens, once a perspective becomes available it remains available; you just have to go on creating the context, the space for it. So for at least one hour go on sitting silently, that will do. Many times you will see me and you will see many more things. Life does not end with the senses; there is much more to life than is available to the senses, but we have to learn the art of becoming sensitive to that which is not available to the senses. Life is mysterious, very mysterious. It is only the fools who think that they understand life, it is only the fools who are tired and bored with life; otherwise it is a constant surprise.


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CHAPTER 7.

It has been a good experience; it has opened a door into you. Now go on knocking on the door. Much more will become available. And don’t analyze things which reason cannot prove or experience. Don’t bring your mind in, in an effort to understand them otherwise you will stop the whole process. The deepest is available only to intuition, not to intellect. It was an intuitive flash, a lightning, in the depth of your soul. It will be happening more and more... [A sannyasin who is leaving says: I feel quite happy about being here and uh... going back home is frightening.] Now I am coming with you, don’t be frightened. I will accompany you, don’t be frightened. It happens to every new sannyasin: when for the first time you go back, a little fear. But once you are there, people will be afraid of you – you just... You need not be afraid. We are going to frighten the whole world. Just wait! [A sannyasin says: Just that I feel very um... very much like lost.] That’s perfectly right, mm? But if you are lost you can be found; that is the beginning of the journey. First one has to lose one’s identity, only then can one know who one is. It is through losing oneself that one finds. The really unfortunate people are those who never feel that they are lost. Then they remain superficial. Everybody is lost, but people are so afraid to feel it that they go on pretending they are not lost. When you come here you cannot avoid the truth, the truth has to be accepted, faced: you are lost, as everybody else is lost. But to understand it is a good beginning. It is a blessing, because if one really feels that ”I am lost”, then one starts searching. Then inquiry begins, then life becomes a quest. And you have started moving. To know that ”I am lost”, is the beginning of a long journey in which one finds oneself. That too will happen one day. I hope one day you will be able to say to me that ”Now I have found myself.” It is a long, arduous journey, with many pains and with many pleasures, with many dark valleys and many sunlit peaks, many peaks of joy and many lows of sorrow and sadness. But one has to accept both and go on inquiring. One day the witness arrives. One day you start feeling that you are just a witness: you are neither sad nor happy. Both things come and go and you abide, and that which always abides is your real nature, is your real self, the supreme self.


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CHAPTER 8


Prem means love, das means a servant – a servant of love. But to be a servant of love is the way to become a master. One who is ready to surrender to love becomes immensely powerful. It is not a defeat; it is a victory. The way of love is very illogical. If you surrender you are victorious. If you try to save yourself you will be lost. If you are ready to lose yourself you will find yourself; in fact for the first time you will know who you are. The way of love is the way of paradox. In love opposites meet and become one: defeat and victory become one, life and death become one. All dualities disappear. Love means union of the opposites. Love is so vast that it can contain its opposite too and yet remain itself. Gyan means wisdom, dip means a lamp – a lamp of wisdom. Man lives in darkness for one single reason; the name of the reason is identification. We become identified with the body, we become identified with the mind, we become identified with the heart. This is the triangle in which man goes on moving – from doing to feeling, from feeling to thinking, from thinking to doing. We just go on moving between this triangle, never becoming aware that we are neither thinking nor feeling nor doing: we are the witness of it all. The whole art of meditation is to create a distance from doing, from thinking, from feeling, to see them as separate, not to become one with them; to keep oneself awake, watching, but never being entrapped by them. If one can watch oneself doing all kinds of things, thinking all kinds of thoughts, feeling all kinds of feelings, if one can go on watching, this watching creates light inside. The darkness starts disappearing. This watching becomes the lamp of wisdom. 24

CHAPTER 8.

This is your work: you have to become more and more alert about everything, pay more and more attention. Whatsoever you are doing or thinking or feeling, bring the quality of awareness to it; don’t become identified. Identification is darkness; non-identification is light. And in light is immortality, in light is bliss, in light is our home. [A sannyasin who is leaving says: Can the psychic aberration of the mind be controlled? Can the wanderings of the psychic mind be controlled? I find it difficult... ] It is always better to watch rather than control. If you control something you will have to control it forever. It will become a constant tension in you. You will have to remain on guard, because if you relax the control will be gone. Control is not right and control is a conflict. Those psychic energies are your energies; if you control them you will have to fight with them. If you control them they will start rebelling against you; they will give a good fight to you. And by con-trol you can never overcome them. They will always be there repressed, and whenever the opportunity arises, whenever you are not on guard, they will assert themselves. Control is not the right way to encounter one’s energies. The right way is to watch them and give them freedom. Let the mind go wherever it wants; let the energies move wherever they move. You remain centered in your watching, you remain unconcerned – just a pure witness, just like a mirror, reflecting: whatsoever is happening is good. Then slowly slowly as the watcher becomes stronger it starts absorbing the energies. Then energies are not available for psychic wandering, and those wanderings start stopping on their own accord. When the watcher is totally into it, all wanderings simply disappear; and that is real control. Without controlling it is controlling, without repression you are the master. And then you need not be on guard; you can be absolutely relaxed because you have nothing to be afraid of. My approach is: through witnessing absorb the energy rather than through control, fight. Fight is not right, never right: it dissipates energy; it creates division, it makes you split. So insist on being aware, that’s all. Don’t judge what is wrong and what is right; don’t judge whether the psychic wandering is good or bad. Let it be as it is. Simply remain in deep acceptance that whatsoever is, is good, and through that acceptance a transformation happens and a real mastery arises. Nobody is defeated and yet you are victorious. That is the real art. Controlling, repressing, fighting is simply stupid. It leads nowhere. It only leads into neurosis, into schizophrenia – beware of it. The very idea has to be dropped. [A sannyasin who is leaving says: I know I love you so much but I don’t feel it is very deep.] Mm mm. I understand. Don’t be worried these are the good signs of a deepening love.


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CHAPTER 8.

It always happens: when you love much you will always feel that it is not deep enough. Only shallow lovers think that their love is very deep. The deeper you go, the shallower you will feel, because each new depth makes you aware of deeper realms that are ahead. The more you know, the less you know, because you become aware of the infinity. And that’s how it happens in love. Don’t be worried at all. Your love is deepen-ing and it is going to deepen more and more. Don’t make it a desire, because desire is always shallow. Forget all about it. It is already happening – enjoy it, celebrate it! [A sannyasin says: I feel sad about leaving.] Think of coming back – that will make you happy! Never think of going; always think of coming. Going is just a way to come back. (laughter) Feel happy: you will be back soon. And distance sometimes creates great longing and great love, so it is not going to be a loss: you are going to be benefited by it. Help my people there! [A sannyasin says he wants to open his heart.] It will open – nothing to worry about. Just be here with no desire, not even the desire of opening the heart. Just be here with no motive, because every motive becomes a hindrance – even the motive to open. Just be here and enjoy. Dance, sing, meditate and forget the whole world. For these few days that you will be here this is your whole world, and then the opening happens on its own. It is going to happen!


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CHAPTER 9


[A sannyasin asks: Can you see where there’s something wrong with my feelings? – because up to now I have not been able to feel the energy. Osho checks his energy.] It will open – nothing to worry about. Just be here with no desire, not even the desire of opening the heart. Just be here with no motive, because every motive becomes a hindrance – even the motive to open. Just be here and enjoy. Dance, sing, meditate and forget the whole world. For these few days that you will be here this is your whole world, and then the opening happens on its own. It is going to happen! Nothing is wrong with the feeling center, but you are not in connection with it. The center is functioning perfectly well, but your mind and your heart are disconnected so you cannot feel your feelings: you only think your feelings. You think you love – everything turns into a thought. Unless it becomes a thought you cannot become aware of it; you cannot feel it as a feeling. That’s the problem. The heart and the head are not bridged. You have bypassed the heart, you have not gone through it. But this is nothing special about you; it is almost a normal case today. Everybody is in this kind of space because the whole structure of the society helps you to bypass the heart. It is very afraid of the heart. Our whole culture depends on repressing feelings. We live through the head because the head has a kind of clarity, logic, consistency, control, and these are the values in our so-called society. The heart is a chaos – a poetic chaos, but a chaos is a chaos. And the world of feelings are never very clear: they are always vague – hints, shadows. It is the world of twilight: neither day nor night, something in between. And our society is very much afraid of anything which is not very clear. 27

CHAPTER 9.

We praise the value of clarity. We discard all that is unclear, mysterious, hence we remain con-fined to the superficial. Only the superficial is clear. Depths cannot be clear, they have to be dark. The deeper you go, the darker they become. But if you continue meditating this bridging will happen. Which meditation do you like the most? [He answers: Kundalini.] Continue kundalini. Within six months to nine months, one day you will suddenly feel a metamorphosis. Suddenly you are feeling, they have all exploded. And it is a totally new experience. One becomes alive; one pulsates with great ecstasy. The head knows no ecstasy at all; it knows only anx-iety, anguish. The heart knows no anxiety, no anguish; it knows only joy. Just go on meditating and don’t be bothered whether it is happening or not, because that worry will come from the head. Forget about it. One day suddenly it will come as a surprise. God always comes as a surprise! Sat means true, Ulla means nobleness – true nobleness. And true nobility has nothing to do with birth; it has nothing to do with race; it has nothing to do with any country. True nobleness has something to do with your inner flowering. Unless a person opens up and becomes a flower he is not noble. He remains mean. He remains cruel, violent. Deep down he remains ugly. He may even create a kind of character around himself but that character remains only a facade, a camouflage to hide the ugly inner being. He may be very sophisticated, cultivated, cultured, educated on the outside, but that makes no difference: his inner world remains crude, primitive, animalistic. True nobility comes only through a deepening of love, a deepening of meditativeness. When your inner world becomes full of love and light your outer also becomes illuminated but not vice versa. the inner has to happen first; the outer follows as a shadow. What we do ordinarily is just the opposite: we try to cultivate the outer and hope that the inner will follow. That is not possible. The inner is so tremen-dously powerful that it cannot follow the outer. The outer is only skin-deep; it cannot even touch the inner. But once the inner changes, the outer has to change; it changes automatically. Every real change first has to happen in the deepest core of your being. Hence I teach consciousness not character, hence I teach meditation not morality, because a meditative person necessarily becomes moral, and a conscious person necessarily has a great character. Sat means true, gyan means wisdom. Wisdom is true only if it is yours, if you have arrived at it by your own experience, if it has the seal of your own being. Otherwise wisdom is far more dangerous than ignorance. If it is borrowed, if you have imbibed it from others then it is nothing but a coverup for your inner ignorance and darkness. It can’t help. It may give you a good ego but it cannot become the bridge to the divine. It may help you to become more well-known, respectable, knowledgeable.


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All those things it can do, but deep down you will remain as ignorant as ever. It can make you almost oblivious of your ignorance, and that is the danger in it. When death comes all wisdom that is borrowed simply disappears, is of no use. It can’t become the boat to the ultimate. It was a paper boat. But if you recognize it when death has come it is too late. One has to recognize it before then. Make a boat of your own. My function here is not to give you knowledge, not to give you wisdom, but to help you to attain to your own wisdom, to help you to attain to your own light, to help you to become an individual. [The new sannyasin says: When I was sitting inside the gate waiting for darshan, I felt that it was difficult for anybody to get in and to attack you. When I realized that I was thinking about that, I asked myself whether I wanted to attack you..... I felt confused and guilty and... and sad that still on every occasion when I feel loving there is always some hatred and poison in it as well. It’s a big problem for me.] Don’t make it a big problem. It is with everybody: if you love, you hate too. It is natural and it has to be accepted. Slowly slowly through deep understanding a totally different kind of love arises which has no polar opposite to it. But in the beginning love is followed by hate; they are together. If you bring your understanding, watchfulness, awareness to it, a moment comes, certainly, when a new love which has no counterpart to it is born. But when the disciple comes he has both: he has doubt and trust, he has love and hate. He brings the whole duality: he has love and hate. He brings the whole duality that man is. He brings his dual mind, and that is natural. How can you bring a non-dual mind? And if you had a non-dual mind there would have been no need to come at all. You have come to learn how to be non-dual so you come as a duality. I accept you as a duality, and then we start working slowly slowly. And one day that moment also comes when the duality disap-pears. That is the real day of initiation. This is just a formal initiation. The second initiation has to be attained. It takes time, effort, work upon yourself, and much observation of how the mind functions. It is good that you observed, it is good that you noted it, it is good that you told it to me. This is the beginning; the journey has started and the goal will not be very far. Deva means divine, Paolo means small, little – a divine littleness, a divine smallness, divine humbleness, a divine nobodiness. One has to become a nobody. That is the greatest thing in life because once one is a nobody by dying one attains to eternal light. Learn the art of dying. Learn through love, through music, through poetry, through dance; learn through meditation, prayer, but learn the art of dying and disappearing. The day you don’t find yourself in is the greatest day of rejoicing. celebration, because when you are not, God is. Just Around the Corner

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CHAPTER 9.

[A sannyasin is leaving and says: I keep wondering what you see happening with me and I was wondering if you could tell me something I could take back.] Stop wondering. Let it happen, because what you call wondering is not really wondering, it is thinking. If it is wondering it is beautiful, but it is not. It is just thinking, analyzing, watching, keeping an eye on what is happening. That becomes a disturbance; it is a distraction: it does not allow the flow to have its course, its natural course. And if you constantly go on keeping an eye on what is happen-ing then things that would have happened will not happen. The energies are very shy, you just have to let them happen. Even to observe becomes a distraction . It is almost as if you are in your bathroom and suddenly you become aware that somebody is looking through the keyhole. Immediately you become a different person; you are no more the same person. Just a moment before you were a different person; you were in privacy. Now you are no more in privacy; somebody is looking. That very look changes you. The change is very subtle but very quick, immediate. And that’s what happens with inner energies. If you are looking at them they disappear into the unconscious, they hide in the darkness. Drop that habit. Things are happening. Enjoy them rather than thinking about them. It is better to dance them rather than to think about them. Sing them. Paint them. Once when Isadora Duncan was asked ”What is the secret of your dance?” she said ”The secret is that I want to say something but there is no other way to say it, so I dance it. That is the only way to say it.” When a dancer has something to say through his dance there is something tremendously beautiful in it. When a dancer has nothing to say then he is simply moving through physical exercises. It may be yoga but it is not dance. Dance is a communication, a communion. When a painter has nothing to say he functions as a technician. He may be good as a camera but he is not an artist. When the painter has something to say which he cannot say in any other way, then his painting has something mysterious abut it. So is the case with poetry, music and every art. Don’t think about these things. When you feel them happening, dance, sing, play music rather than thinking because thinking will be a hindrance. And all these things – dancing, singing, playing, running, swimming – these will be helpful. They will allow the energies to come more and more into the open. And much is on the way if you can allow. You will go on becoming richer and richer.


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Deva means divine, Arie means black – divine blackness. Black is symbolic of death. It is also symbolic of infinity, of the mysterious, of the uncaused. Light has to be caused. Light needs fuel; once the fuel is finished light is gone. Darkness is eternal. It needs no cause, no fuel: it is simply there. Light comes and goes; darkness remains, abides. Remember these qualities of the dark. Life is not mathematical. Those who try to find out clear-cut answers in life go on missing the whole point. Life is a beautiful chaos. It is poetry; it is love. And there are great gaps, intervals which cannot be bridged by mind. There are quantum leaps in life. You cannot find a thread, how one thing leads to another. It simply jumps from one point to another for no reason at all. Unless one is ready to be open to such a mysterious existence one remains non-religious. To be ready to receive the mysterious is what sannyas is all about. And that’s something tremendously great, the readiness to receive the mysterious, because it defies all laws of logic. It certainly tunes in with the heart but not with the head. Anything to say to me? Anand means bliss and harp means musical instrument. The full name will mean a musical instrument for bliss. Man is exactly a musical instrument for bliss. Man is exactly a musical instrument with the possibility of great music arising in him. But instead of reaching to that music we turn ourselves into insane noise because we don’t know how to play this musical instrument. Just having the musical instrument does not mean that you will have music. You may create a nuisance to yourself and others too.

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It needs great art, learning to play with one’s own life, to play on one’s own life. Meditation is the art to create music from your heart. Meditation is simply the method to transform noise into harmony, the method to shift your consciousness from the head to the heart. The head is noisy, it is all noise – a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing. The heart is silent, but that silence is not negative. That silence is very resounding, resonating. That resonance of the silence is music. All the mystics have talked about it: that deep down in the innermost core of man is hidden great music. Once we have allowed it, once we have heard it, once we have created it, played upon it, we are no more part of this earth. We remain on the earth but we simply go beyond gravitation. We start growing wings, wings that can take us to the unknown, to the ultimate. It is on the wings of music that one has to go to God. Prem means love, Patrick means aristocrat. Love gives a kind of aristocracy. Love is so rare, it makes one an aristocrat, it makes one unique. The aristocracy that one gets through birth is nothing; it is accidental. The real aristocracy has to be earned; it cannot just be by the accident of birth, one has to grow into it. And the way to grow into it is love, because love makes one rich. Love gives you the keys of the kingdom of God. The crowd knows nothing of love; only very few individuals have tasted the nectar of it. All have the potential but they go on missing. In fact they don’t even want to hear that they have the potential They become angry: they became angry with Jesus; they are angry with me. They are always angry if you tell them ”You are missing something.” They want consolations; they don’t want any revolution. They want to be told ”You are perfectly good as you are,” ”This is the end,” ”This is all that life is about.” They want to be satisfied, consoled; they don’t want to be unsettled. And to tell them that there is a kingdom of God and to tell them ”You are capable of entering into the kingdom.” and to tell them ”You have the capacity, the key that can open the doors, is to make them worried. Great anxiety arises in them. They start feeling anguish and they retaliate. Rather than changing their life and moving towards love they start hating the person who has created the anxiety in them. Everything was going so well, they were so satisfied. They were as satisfied as cows and buffaloes are. Their satisfaction was not human, it was subhuman. To tell them, ”You are missing something – you are missing God, love, meditation, ecstasy,” is to make them angry. They get into a rage; they cannot tolerate such a messenger. Hence love has remained one of the really aristocratic phenomena. It makes you noble. It makes you special, it makes you unique. You are no more part of the crowd; suddenly you are an individual. That individuality is of immense value, because that individuality is the birth of a soul in you. Without it a man is soulless. Without it a man only exists, he does not live. Deva means divine, Dieter means a king, a ruler – a divine king. Man is not a beggar, although he remains a beggar – that is his own responsibility. He is born to be a king but he never makes any effort, he never tries to be that which he is destined to be. He remains fast asleep, he never wakes up. Just Around the Corner

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In his dreams he begs – and he is a king! If he wakes up he is a king; if he remains asleep he remains a beggar. To be asleep, metaphysically asleep, is to be a beggar; and to be awake, metaphysically awake, to become a Buddha, the awakened one, is to become a king. Initiation into sannyas means that you are taking a vow to wake up, that enough is enough, that you have slept enough, that now it is time, that the dawn is coming closer, that you should gather your energies and you should make all possible effort to wake up. Yes, it takes all possible effort – your total surrender, your total action – to wake up, because we have been asleep so long that we have completely forgotten that there is something like a state called enlightenment, awakening, samadhi. We have completely forgotten about it. Once you wake up you will be surprised that this is your nature. You will be puzzled how you had fallen asleep. And once you are awake you will know that you have tasted this thing somewhere, long long ago, maybe many many lives ago, at the very beginning, or maybe in your mother’s womb or maybe in your childhood. You will remember many moments also when this had happened, but you were so asleep that even if once in a while you opened your eyes you thought that too was part of a dream, that that too was part of your sleep. This has to become a deep longing, such a deep longing that one can risk all for it, only then does one wake up. And that’s what the meaning of sannyas is: the color orange is the color of the morning, of the rising sun, the time to wake up.


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CHAPTER 11


Anand means bliss, Alan means harmony. Harmony is bliss; bliss is another name of harmony. Misery is discord. Existence is always in harmony – it is only man who falls apart because of the ego, because of the idea of ”I am”. He wants to create a world of his own, separate, private, hence he becomes a small island and loses contact with the total. Sannyas is a bridge back to the total, a journey backwards to the source. And the only thing that has to be renounced is the ego because that is the only discordant note. Once ego is gone you immediately start pulsating with the whole, and that pulsation is bliss. That pulsation brings two things into existence: one is the experience of light; the other is the experience of music, because pulsation creates light and sound. Light and sound are two aspects of pulsation, rhythmic pulsation, hence light can be transformed into sound and sound can be transformed into light. They are easily convertible. Now electronics has made it possible: you can play music and at the same time colors will go on changing. There will be a music of colors too, simultaneously. This has always been experienced it has been a very ancient discovery – of course without any scientific instruments. It was known in the inner experience that when the ego disappears one pulsates with existence. Feeling no separation, no barrier, suddenly two things happen: one is full of light and full of music. It is music that is very strange because there is no musical instrument and no musician. And it is a light also which is very strange. It is not the light that we have known before, because the lights that we have known before are all temporary: once the fuel is lost, gone, the light disappears. But when you come to the inner light it is eternal. It has no cause; it is simply there; and so is the inner music: it is simply there.

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To know inner light and inner melody is to know God. Those are the two real faces of God. Anand means bliss, Rajendra means king of kings. Bliss makes one king of kings. And bliss is something that is already inside you. You have never been without it. One cannot be without it: one can forget it, one can become oblivious of it, one may not remember it for lives together, but it goes on like an undercurrent; it goes on flowing in you. It is your very life. It is the very nature of our being. So the kingdom is not somewhere outside, the kingdom is within. Those who seek it outside are doomed to fail. They may attain to great power, they may become an Alexander the Great or a Napoleon or an Adolf Hitler, but they will remain beggars, spiritual beggars. They may have all the possible wealth of the world but they will remain poor, because poverty can be dispelled only when you have come in contact with your inner richness. Begging disappears immediately as you become aware of your blissfulness. Initiation into sannyas means that now you are deciding to turn in. It is a decisive moment. It is a question of life and death. It is not a casual thing; much depends on it. It can become the beginning of a new life, but all depends on you. The first step is the most difficult, then everything else is easy because the second step is almost the same as the first, and so is the third. Lao Tzu says that by knowing how to take one single step one can travel ten thousand miles, because it is the same step again and again and again. Be surrendered. Forget that you exist separately from me. This is sannyas: getting involved, committed – and so totally that the heart goes on saying only yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes has to be your mantra and that will take you to the furthest reality, to the highest peak, to the ultimate crescendo. Go on saying yes. It should become your very climate. That’s what sannyas is all about: making yes your climate. Anand means bliss, Dwariko means door. Man is a door, a door to the divine. Man in himself is nothing but only a door, an opening into God. Man is just an opening. To remain confined to man is the most stupid thing in the world. Man is not a being but only a bridge, something to be passed over, something to be surpassed. Use it, but you are not it, remember. This remembrance slowly slowly reveals a new reality within you, which is within you and yet not identified with you, which is transcendental. It is a kind of silent witness that goes on watching everything. It watches what you are doing, it watches what you are thinking, it watches what you are feeling; it simply goes on watching. It is never a doer, never a thinker, never a feeler – it is just pure awareness. That pure awareness is God. You are a door to it, and sannyas has to become a remembrance. Anand means bliss, Sangit means music. there is music in every heart which hankers to be expressed, a song which longs to be sung, a dance which is waiting to be danced. Every man is born with a song but very few fortunate ones sing it; it remains a potential, unused, unexpressed. that’s what misery is; not to be fulfilled is misery. A tree without flowers is in misery. So is a man who has not sung his song, who has not danced his dance, whose music remained in the seed and never became a sprout, whose season never came, Just Around the Corner

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whose spring was only in the hope and never became a reality. That is misery. and just the opposite is bliss. My work here consists in helping you to find your song. I cannot sing it for you, I cannot teach you the song either because any song taught from the outside will not be yours. Hence the function of a Master is a very delicate function. The Master is not a teacher, cannot be. It is not a question of your having to be taught something. On the contrary something has to be provoked in you, not forced on you; something has to be drawn out from you. And all teachers go on putting, stuffing, things in you: theories, dogmas, doctrines. The function of a Master is not to indoctrinate; his function is to help you to be free from all burdens, rocks that are hanging around your neck. Once those rocks are removed your spring will start flowing, your song will start welling up. It is there, obstructed. Nobody can predict what it is, it is unpredictable. Only one thing is certain, that there is a song because nobody is born without it. It is the innermost core of your being. There is creativity in every person that needs to be expressed. what it is cannot be said; one comes to know it only when it becomes manifest. One’s own self is surprised when it becomes manifest. when you sing your song, you will be surprised: you will not be able to recognize it as yours. It will be so beyond you, it will be so transcendental to you, it will look as if it is descending from above. But if you are ready, if you are willing, I can take you to that source. It is yours. It is already there. It is a gift from God. You just have to be introduced to it; you are not aware of it, not aware of your own treasure. It is as if one has fallen asleep: one is a king and has fallen asleep and dreams that one is a beggar. You need to be shaken, you need to be awakened. That’s what sannyas is all about: your willingness to be shocked, your readiness to be awakened.


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CHAPTER 12


Prem means love, Anne means prayer – love is prayer. Those who pray without love, their prayers are empty, hollow of meaning. Their prayers are without wings. Their prayers will never reach to God. Only when love throbs at the heart inside the prayer is it alive, significant, and has it the energy to reach to God. It reaches instantly, no time gap is needed; in fact it reaches before you have said it. Prem means love, Franck means free. Love exists only as freedom. The moment freedom is gone, love is gone; then you have only a corpse. The bird on the wing is one thing; the same bird in the cage is no more the same bird. It has lost its sky, and that was its soul. Now it only appears to be alive. It is exactly the same on the surface, but when the outer sky disappears, the inner soul also disappears. They exist together; they are two aspects of the same phenomenon; the outer and the inner are not separate. So is the case with love. Never encage it. It is comfortable to encage, convenient, secure, hence the mind tends to possess the object of love, but the moment you possess you are also possessed. You cannot be the possessor without being the possessed. People are mutual slaves: both are masters and both are slaves. And whenever there is slavery love simply disappears. It cannot exist in that small space. It needs the whole sky to exist. True love brings freedom to you and to all those you love. True love leads you slowly slowly towards the ultimate freedom. The name of the ultimate freedom is God. Prem means love, Divo means a lamp – a lamp of love. Love brings light into the soul; otherwise the inner world remains in darkness and the darkness is dense, very deep, and very ancient. But once love is born in the heart, howsoever dense, howsoever ancient it is, it simply disappears in a single

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moment, because darkness has no existence of its own: it is just absence of light. Man’s ignorance is nothing but absence of love. Bring love into the heart and everything else follows. All the qualities that have been praised down the ages are just byproducts of love. If there is love there is compassion, there is service. If there is love there is non-violence, humanity. If there is love one cannot cheat, one cannot deceive. If there is love one cannot be pseudo. Love is the only commandment to be followed. All other commandments are byproducts. [A sannyasin who is leaving says: Something is in my being that my body can’t cope with... in here (touching her belly) that my body can’t cope with. Osho checks her energy.] Good, it will go. It is something beautiful – nothing to be worried about. Some dormant energy is arising. Listen to music, dance, and it will go slowly. It is not a problem, it is not a disease. Be happy about it! [Another sannyasin who is leaving says: Osho, I love you... Teradas means the servant. I’m confused as to whose servant I am.] Mm mm! Of the whole. Don’t be a miser: be a servant of the whole, of the total, When we ask ”whose servant?” we are being miserly. We are trying to be a servant only of the part, excluding the rest. Don’t exclude anything: be a servant to the river, mountains, trees, people. Just be a servant, that is the point, not to whom. Serve. It is not a question of the object; it is a question of your inner quality. Just remain in that state of service, available. [Another sannyasin who is leaving says: I’m so confused I don’t know who I am anymore.] That’s a very good sign (laughter). That’s the beginning of clarity. If you can see your confusion, clarity has already started. This is clarity. The really confused person is one who does not know that he is confused. If you know you are confused you have started coming out of it. This is the beginning, and once you start coming out of it you will be out of it soon; it will all be gone. Confusion arises because we have been given so many contradictory thoughts from so many sources. The church says one thing; the politics, the state, says another thing; the mother says one thing, the father says another thing; and the friends are saying something else. The psychoanalyst is teaching one thing and the priest is teaching another thing. All these kinds of things are there and they all jumble together in your mind. They are in conflict and you are at a loss: who are you? My whole effort here is to help you to drop all these thoughts that have been given to you by others. Once you have cleaned your inside completely, once you have emptied yourself totally, in that emptiness clarity Is born. That emptiness is clarity.


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Then your eyes are full of wonder and awe and then you can see because there is no prejudice no conclusion. Then you function from the state of innocence. But this is the beginning – to be aware of confusion. Soon all these conflicting ideas will be gone.


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CHAPTER 13


Prem means love, Barbara means a stranger. Love is a stranger in this world; hate is not. hate is part of the very fabric of this world; love comes from the beyond. Hate belongs to the earth; love is part of the sky. Hate gravitates downwards; love soars upwards. Love is a stranger, and because love is a stranger, love becomes the vehicle to God. Because love is not part of this world love can take you into another world, to the other shore; it can become the vehicle, the boat. Hold fast to love and drop anything that goes against love. That’s true sannyas, that is true renunciation: renouncing all that goes against love and celebrating all that is part of love and enhances it. Anand means bliss, Mandiro means a temple – a temple of bliss. Man has the potential to become a temple of God, and unless he becomes it he remains unfulfilled. Life is meaningless unless God comes and becomes a guest in you; life can’t have any significance. We can have money, and we can have power and we can have respect, but deep down you will remain aware that something is missing because whatsoever we can attain in the outside world cannot fill the inner emptiness. Only God can enter into the innermost core of your being, only God. Not even you lover can reach that core. That’s why love frustrates very much: you aspire, you long, you hope that now this is going to happen. It is always just on the verge of happening but it never happens. That’s why nothing is more frustrating in life than love, because nothing is more promising than love. It is just going to happen it seems and one is so expectant, but it never happens and then there is great frustration. It cannot happen. We are asking the impossible: even your lover cannot penetrate to the innermost core of your being. That is available only to God. And to open yourself to God is sannyas. To be available to him is sannyas, to be non-resistant to him is sannyas. 40

CHAPTER 13.

Paul means small, little; Narayano is a name of God. To be small, so small that one is almost nothing, is the way to God. Not to be is the door to being in God, for being God. The whole art of religion is the art of disappearing, evaporating so that the big ego goes on becoming smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, and one day it is gone forever. When it is really gone what is left is divine, is godliness. The ego is hiding it, covering it. The ego is the only barrier, and the last barrier. Start dropping chunks of the ego; that will make you a Paul – smaller, smaller, smaller. and the day when you are not is the day of great rejoicing because then instantly God is there. Not to find yourself is to find God. Deva means God, Nicole means victory – God’s victory. Let God be victorious over you. Don’t hanker for your own victory, don’t desire your own success. Don’t desire anything, just let God be victorious over you. His will has to be your will. To leave oneself totally in the hands of God in utter surrender and trust is to be religious, is to be meditative, is to be prayerful. Prayer is not a ritual: it is a surrender. And meditation is not a method: it is a trust. And God is not a hypothesis which has to be proved by arguments: it is an experience, the experience of total surrender to existence. Having no will on one’s own is the door to God. Remember Jesus’ words again and again – that’s exactly the meaning of your name: Let thy kingdom come, let thy will be done. Anand means blissful, Claudio means lame – blissfully lame. Lame is a metaphor, a metaphor for human limitations, a metaphor for human imperfections, a metaphor for human weaknesses. One has to blissfully accept ail limitations, all imperfections, all weaknesses. To accept oneself as one is, is a great step towards growth. Not trying to improve upon oneself is the best way to improve – just relaxing, accepting, and leaving it to God. Dance even if you are lame. Dream even if you are blind. If you cannot hear the outer sounds, if you are deaf, hear the inner sounds! Find a way in your limitations, through your limitations, and then each limitation becomes a stepping stone. They have to be used rather than distorted because God never gives anything which is not really needed. Whatsoever he gives is needed. We may not understand, we may not be able to see the point immediately, that s why we go on missing many blessings: because they come in disguise. But the person who accepts totally cannot miss any opportunity. Because he accepts even calamities, how can he miss? In whatsoever form the blessing comes he is ready to embrace it. That’s the meaning of your name: a blissful acceptance of all limitations, a deep acceptance of humanity, desiring no perfection. Then suddenly a transformation happens: the imperfections start falling into a hole; the jigsaw puzzle itself, of its own accord, starts settling. All discord starts disappearing and a great harmony arises; that harmony is God. Sannyas is a search for God. [A sannyasin says: All the time I seem to hold back.] It will go. Go on holding! One day you will get so tired that it will slip out of your hands; that’s how it happens. Nobody can drop it; that is part of the human dilemma. You cannot drop it because if you Just Around the Corner

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drop it you become the dropper. You still hold the ego and it is the same game played in new names from the back door. You cannot drop it. You have to carry it; it is your karma. You have to carry the weight, you have to drag it, but one day it is too much. It accumulates, accumulates, accumulates and then it becomes such a Himalayan job to carry it that out of sheer fed-up-ness it slips from your hands and suddenly it is gone and you are free of it. That’s how it happens. It is exactly like sleep: if you try you will not be able to sleep at all. Try tonight; try to sleep. Every effort is against sleep. Even trying to sleep is against sleep. It will keep you aware, alert; you will remain awake. Forget all about it and suddenly one moment it has happened and you are gone into it. Only in the morning will you remember that there was a moment when you were not trying and then it happened. God comes through grace, not through effort; God comes like sleep. But this is part of our situation – that first we have to struggle hard. And every struggle is bound to fail; you cannot succeed through struggling but you have to learn the hard way. So don’t be worried – this is natural, normal. I say go on holding and soon the weight will be so much that you will not be able to hold it any longer. And anything can become the last straw on the camel, remember – anything. One never knows which thing is going to become the last straw. Just a small thing... sometimes very small things have caused tremendous transformations. Lao Tzu was sitting under a tree – he had struggled hard and nothing had happened – and then suddenly a dry leaf, a dead leaf started falling from the tree. And that did it! Seeing that leaf falling so silently without any effort he became enlightened. The whole credit goes to the leaf. Buddha became enlightened seeing the last morning star disappearing. As the star disappeared he disappeared; and for six years he had been struggling hard. One never knows; it happens unexpectedly. It is going to happen, that much I can say. When is not possible to predict, but it is going to happen; that much is certain. So as long as you can carry it carry on. Nothing to be worried about. I have every sympathy with you but what can be done? (laughter)


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CHAPTER 14


Anand means bliss, Tineke means pure – pure bliss. Bliss is impure if it is dependent on something; bliss is pure when it is absolutely independent. Bliss is impure if it is conditional; bliss is pure if it is unconditional. The bliss that arises in love is not pure because the other is needed. Without the other the bliss will disappear. The very energy that becomes bliss, without the other will become misery. The bliss that arises in meditation is pure because it is totally your own. It is just welling up within your own being; it has no context outside. Nothing is needed on the outside for it to exist; it simply exists on its own. It is pure and it has a tremendous beauty. Those are other meanings of Tineke: it also means beauty, grace, devotion. When bliss is pure it has a beauty, the beauty of freedom, the beauty of being alone. And it has grace because it is not dependent. It has no boundaries. When you are dependent on somebody you can never forgive him. Hence lovers cannot forgive each other; they go on fighting; they are intimate enemies. They are bound to remain in a conflict. The conflict is because the bliss Is dependent on the other, it is in the other’s hands, so you are in the other’s hands. He possesses the key. Certainly you cannot forgive the person who possesses the key for your bliss. When he wants it will be there; when he does not want it will not be there. You are a prisoner and a prisoner cannot have grace. Grace is when there is freedom. The bird on the wing has grace, the wild animal has grace – not the animal in the circus, in the zoo, no... no grace at all. All grace disappears. And out of bliss arises devotion. Devotion is the fragrance of bliss. When you feel so utterly blissful how can you remain without thanking God or the whole? The thankfulness arises on its own; it is inevitable. 43

CHAPTER 14.

Anand means bliss, Nityo means eternal. Bliss is not momentary: when it comes it comes forever. That which comes and goes is not bliss. It is something else; it is just a reflection of bliss; we call it happiness. It is just like on the full-moon night you see the moon in the lake, the reflection. It is momentary: just a little breeze and the lake will be disturbed, ripples will arise and the reflection will be lost. Again and again it will be there and again and again it will be gone. But if you look at the moon, not at the reflection, then it is eternal. Happiness is a reflection of bliss. We go on chasing happiness and we go on again and again becoming miserable, because once it is there and for a moment we are ecstatic and the next moment we fall in agony. One moment it is heaven, another moment it is hell. Sannyas means starting to look for the original instead of the reflection. It is the search for the real moon... not the reflected one.


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CHAPTER 15


[To Bob, Osho adds Anand – making him the blissful and shining one.] Bliss has its own luminosity, it shines forth. You cannot hide it: it is like a lamp lit; it will show, it will shine, it will declare itself. Of course, utterly silent is its declaration. Non-aggressive is its declaration. but it cannot remain unmanifested. It has to be manifested; that is inevitable. That is one of the most essential qualities of bliss. Misery you can hide; bliss you cannot. And there is no need to either – it has to be shared, it has to be danced, it has to be sung. [Zarl is just fourteen.] Veet means going beyond, transcending, surpassing. Zarl comes from Persian: it means thunder. Going beyond all thunder, all storm – that is the meaning of your name. Mind is constantly in a state of storm, turmoil; it is never silent. And because it is always noisy, always cloudy we go on missing the still, small voice within. God does not shout, he whispers, he speaks in silence. Silence is the only way to commune with God, and one has to put all the storms, turmoils of the mind aside. One has to learn the art of turning the mind off. It need not be on for twenty-four hours a day. One has not to destroy it – it is a beautiful instrument to be used – but one should be the master; the machine should not be the master. And mastery means that you should be capable of turning it on and off. If you cannot turn it off then you are not the master. Then it goes of its own accord; it doesn’t care about you. The whole art of sannyas is in creating the mastery, the inner mastery. One has to become so masterful that when one wants immediately one can say to the mind ”Keep quiet” and it keeps quiet. Once you know the art the mind becomes very obedient. 45

CHAPTER 15.

And this is the right time to start learning because when people start late in life first they have to unlearn many things. You are young enough; you have not yet learned many stupid things, so much garbage is not there. You can easily move into meditation. Dance, sing, and try to lose yourself, try to become one with the dance. Then suddenly there will be moments when you see that you are capable, you are infinitely powerful. There will be moments when you know that you are the master. You are not and the mastery is. You are absolutely not there, no ego exists, but now if you say ”Shut up” the mind immediately disappears. You can call it forth, it comes back. Once vou know how it happens... it is a knack; one knows only by knowing, there is no other way to know it... once you have known it your life will have a totally different flavor, a different meaning. You will not miss the beauty, the benediction, of life. Anand means bliss, Anna has many meanings: grace, mercy, compassion, prayer, but I will choose compassion for you. That has to become your path: be a blissful compassion to each and everybody. On all that exists just shower your compassion, on the trees and on the rocks, on the animals and on people, with no discrimination of good or bad, on the sinner and on the saint, with no judgment of right and wrong, because compassion cannot judge, because compassion cannot condemn. Compassion is unconditional. It only knows how to give. It never thinks to whom – whomsoever is available, whomsoever is ready to take, whomsoever is receptive. It goes on sowing seeds of love, of bliss, of godliness, all around, utterly unconcerned about the results. Once one can get in tune with such a state of compassion one falls in tune with God because God is such a compassion. Hence I say that this is your path: be compassionate, blissfully compassionate. [A sannyasin says: I don’t totally trust anybody except for you, and I’m leaving.] I will be coming with you! You can go but you cannot leave me because I will not leave you even if you try to leave. Don t be worried, no need to worry. Even if you can trust one person in your life that’s enough. That is enough of a door for God. One need not have a very big door; just a small door will do. And when you have tasted the nectar of trust you will start trusting many many more people. Even unawares you will start trusting people who are going to deceive you and you know that they are going to deceive you. But when one knows the beauty of trust one does not bother about whether people will deceive or exploit or take advantage; one does not care. Trust in itself is such a joy, an end unto itself. This is enough: if you trust me, that is enough. And miracles are going to happen through it! [A sannyasin says she has started working in the ashram.] Working? That’s very good! Just get lost in me. Don’t leave even a trace behind; simply evaporate. That’s the only way to be with me and that is the only way of finding yourself. By losing oneself one finds; by trying to save one loses.


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CHAPTER 16


Veet means going beyond, transcending, surpassing. Peter means a rock, a stone. Man is born as a rock but has to become a flower. Unless the rock of the heart opens and becomes a lotus life is in vain. And that’s what happens in most cases: people are born as rocks, they live as rocks, they die as rocks. In fact life never happened to them. They never knew anything worth knowing, they never lived a moment of ecstasy, joy, utter abandon. They never knew what it means to be. They were and yet they were not. The heart closed is a rock; the heart open is a lotus. The rock is hiding a lotus inside it. The rock is not just a rock; it has infinite potentialities. Man has to work on the rock, hammer on the rock so that slowly slowly the hidden comes to the surface, so that the hard crust is broken and the hard crust dies. Then life is born. That is a rebirth. That is real birth because then there is no death. The unreal birth brings death; the real birth brings deathlessness, eternity. Deva means divine, Yutaka means richness – divine richness. Man is poor, man is poverty. Without God, man is just a zero. As God enters into your life richness enters. And as God enters your life you start disappearing. You cannot be rich, your very existence is your poverty. Disappear, make way for God. Allow him to come in and possess you. Then life is so abundant, so affluent, so rich, that we cannot even dream about it right now. One cannot imagine what life can be. The beggar cannot imagine what the emperor is. But everybody is trying to reach to that richness. Wrongly, rightly, we are all groping for it. If we grope wrongly we go on becoming more and more poor. The wrong way is to think that by becoming rich in things one is going to become really rich. You can possess all the things of the

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world and yet you will be poor unless God possesses you. The man of possessions is a poor man and the man who is possessed by the divine is rich. Great courage is needed to be possessed by God; great madness is needed to be possessed by God; great love is needed to be possessed by God. Sannyas is nothing but an initiation into that kind of madness, but that madness is not madness: it is the highest intelligence, the greatest sanity. Anand means bliss, Viru means courageous, courage – a blissful courage. That is the most important quality for the seeker. One needs courage because it is an adventure into the unknown. But the courage has to be cheerful, singing, dancing; it should not be serious. If it is serious it becomes a heavy load. And unfortunately that’s what happens to so-called seekers of truth: they become long faces, they become very serious, holier-than-thou. They are always judging others as condemned. They are always thinking of themselves as special. Those become the hindrances. Be playful, cheerful, blissful. The search for God is not a serious affair. It is not work – it is play. Anand means bliss, Chetan means consciousness. Misery is a byproduct of unconsciousness. It is just by remaining sleepy that we create misery. It is the sleepy person who goes on stumbling, falling into traps, and goes on creating more drunkard: he cannot walk straight, he falls into the gutter. He cannot get out; he is not even conscious of where he is. That’s the normal state of human beings. Bliss is a byproduct of consciousness. The more conscious you become, the more blissful you are. In fact because you become conscious you become incapable of creating misery for yourself. And when there is no misery-creating mechanism in you, of course there is bliss. Bliss is your nature. If you don’t create misery you will be blissful. Blissfulness is not something that has to be achieved. Misery is achieved. That is a great achievement and it needs much work and much mind. Unless you put yourself into creating it with a great determination and perseverance you cannot create misery. Bliss is very simple, spontaneous. All that is needed is not to create misery and you will find bliss. Once the mechanism that creates misery stops functioning bliss wells up. Suddenly you are permeated by a new sweetness, a new benediction which you had never known before. And that is the taste of God: bliss is the taste of God.


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CHAPTER 17


Anand means bliss, Roy has two meanings. One comes from the French; it means the king. The other comes from the Celtic; it means red. Both are beautiful. Bliss makes you a king. Without bliss one may be Alexander the Great but one remains poorer than the poor. One of the most naked fakirs of all ages, Diogenes, laughed at Alexander. When Alex-ander asked ”Why are you laughing?” he said ”I am laughing because I have nothing but I am a king, and you have everything and you are a beggar. Because of this ridiculous situation, because of this absur-dity, I am laughing. You appear to be the king, I appear to be the beggar, but the reality is just the opposite: you are the beggar and I am the king. ”Look into my eyes” Diogenes said to Alexander. Alexander looked into his eyes and said ”If God gives me another opportunity to be born I will ask him to make me Diogenes and not Alexander.” Bliss makes one a king. And bliss is some thing that never comes from without, so the king dom is not without; the kingdom is within. And the other meaning is also significant and relevant for a sannyasin, because red is the color of sannyas – blissful redness. The red represents many things. One: it represents life because it is the color of blood. It represents aliveness. A sannyasin has not to be a monk. A monk is one who shrinks, escapes from the world, commits a slow suicide. The sannyasin has to live in the world as totally as possible, as dancingly as possible. He has not to escape; he has not to become a pale monk. He has not to become a dead leaf; he has to remain alive and juicy. Red is also the color of youth. A sannyasin has to remain young to the very last moment. Even when death comes a sannyasin remains young; youth is his very flavor. It is not a question of age or time. He may be sixty, he may be seventy, he may be one hundred, it doesn’t matter, but he remains young. Youth is his inner space, and by being young I mean that he remains capable of learning. 49

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He never becomes old because he never accumulates experiences. He never becomes old because he never becomes knowledgeable. He remains young because he functions from the state of notknowing, he functions out of innocence. And he is young because he is always in love: in love with existence itself, in love with all its manifestations. Red is also the color of the morning, the dawn, the beginning of the day. Think of your initiation as the end of the night and the beginning of the dawn.


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CHAPTER 18


Prem means love, Sindhu means ocean. Love can only be oceanic; it cannot be small. It cannot be small because it cannot be a closed phenomenon. It is an open, wide sky. Love knows no limitations. Love is not attachment. Love is not possessiveness. When love becomes possessive and love becomes attachment it is no more love; it is simply a corpse. The bird has flown; now you are only carrying an empty cage, howsoever decorated. It may be golden, studded with diamonds, but the bird is no more there, the song is no more there. This is one of the most fundamental qualities of love: it is always greater than the lover and the beloved. It is greater than you. You disappear in it. It is not like a thing that you can manipulate; it is a mystery in which you are lost. You become a drop; it is the ocean. And great courage is needed for the drop to disappear into the ocean. To know love and its oceanic experience is to know God. God is nothing else but love in its ultimate flowering. Prem means love, Yoko means a child of the sun – love, the child of light. Love is the child of light. Love cannot arise out of a dark heart. Out of a dark heart only lust arises. It pretends to be love but it is just the opposite. It is just the opposite because lust exploits: it uses the other as a means; it reduces the other to a thing. It is destructive, destructive of the greatest thing in life: the presence of the person. Love shares. Love does not use the other. Love respects the other and the freedom of the other. Love never reduces the other to a thing; on the contrary love raises the other to divinity. The very

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eyes of the lover give you a flight towards the divine. Love transforms ordinary human beings into gods. But love is possible only if the heart is full of light – and the heart is not full of light, it is surrounded by great darkness. By darkness I mean unconsciousness, and by light I mean consciousness. Start becoming more and more conscious, become more alert. It is a long arduous journey but immensely paying, worth all the trouble, because once one has arrived then one knows what exactly life is, its eternal grandeur, its infinite splendor, its incredible beauty. This is going to be your work: become a child of light so that love can become possible. And this is what sannyas is all about: about life, about love, about light, and where all these three L’s meet, God is experienced. [A sannyasin says: I am afraid that if I go back I will lose what I got here in my heart because I will be among people who are only interested in material things.] Don’t be afraid. Whatsoever you have cannot be taken away. That which can be taken away you didn’t have in the first place. Don’t be worried – something real has started happening in you; it will continue. I only trigger the process, then the process continues. You put in the seed, you water it, and then it starts growing into a sprout. You take a little care of it and one day it is such a strong tree that no care is needed. Yes, it is still delicate, and fear is natural, but don’t be worried at all. Sometimes the worldly situation rather than destroying it enhances it, because it becomes a contrast. It becomes like a blackboard and whatsoever you have attained becomes like a silver line on it – it comes loud and clear. You will feel me more there than you have felt me here because here I am something outside you; there I will be totally inside. Here, to see me you have to open your eyes; there, to see me you will have to close your eyes. I will be just your interiority, your very heart. Don’t be worried. Continue to meditate, and whatsoever has happened will go on growing, maturing.


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CHAPTER 19


Maria comes from Hebrew; it means rebellion. And rebellion is the very flavor of sannyas, rebellion is my message. But remember the distinction – and the distinction is great – between rebellion and revolution. Revolution is an organized effort; rebellion is individual. Revolution becomes automatically political; rebellion remains religious, rebellion is part of spirituality. And Carmela comes from Arabic, it means a fruitful field. The full name will mean rebellion, the fruitful field. It is rebellion that makes you aware of your potentialities, of all that is possible. It makes you alert that you are not finished, that birth is not the end but the beginning, that all that is significant has to happen after birth. In fact death has to be the culmination of your whole life, the blossoming, the opening of the lotus. Man is potentially God, but only potentially. Unless great effort is made it never becomes actual. That great effort is meditation. Meditation is the bridge between the potential and the actual. Rebel against the crowd, rebel against the extrovert life – that is the first part of sannyas. And the second part: turn in, meditate. Start moving deeper and deeper into your very core of being so that the potential can become actual, so that the paradise lost can be regained. Prem means love, Mike means godly, divine. Love is the only experience in life which comes closest to God. Everything else lags far behind. It is only love that can become the door; it is only love that can help you to grow wings to go to the ultimate. Remember that love has two aspects: one is the earthly and the other is the unearthly. Love is a paradox – the meeting of the polar opposites, the meeting of the sky and the earth, the meeting of the body and the soul the meeting of God and universe. Many people become aware only of the first part, the earthly part, then love is reduced to sex. If you become aware of the other side of it then love becomes prayer, and only when love becomes prayer 53

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know that you have known love, never before it. As far as sexuality persists something remains impure, something remains unconscious, something remains like a dark shadow. The moment sexuality disappears and love is only a pure sharing, a joy, a celebration then you have touched the highest peak, the Everest of your being. And the highest peak of your being is the beginning of God. The highest peak of your being is the moment when you touch God’s feet, never before it. The highest in you is lowest in God. And it is love and only love which can take you to the highest peak. I am not saying be against sex; I am saying don’t remain confined in it. Make love more and more unearthly. Make love free of gravitation. Make love more and more a subtle fragrance of friendship, non-possessive, non dominating, and then slowly slowly something opens up in the heart. Sex is an opening downwards, love is an opening upwards; and the heart is the field of both. In old Tantra mythology each center of energy – there are seven centers – is represented as a lotus flower, but hanging downwards. When the love energy starts moving upwards, in that flood of energy those lotuses turn upwards. And the moment your inner wheels start turning upwards you are entering into religious experience. That’s what mysticism is all about. It cannot be explained, it cannot be described; only hints can be given. And that’s the function of the Master: to give you a few hints – then you have to work them out. Buddhas only point the way – then you have to walk the whole journey. It is a long and arduous journey but tremendously fulfilling, incredibly fulfilling. Veet means going beyond, transcending, surpassing. Marc is Latin, it means the god of war. Go beyond war – that is the meaning of your name, go beyond being warlike. Man has lived in war down the ages. Not only on the outside; the outside war has not been so much a calamity as the inside war. Man has been fighting outside, destroying people, and man has been fighting inside and destroying himself. The outer war is perfectly well-known; it is visible. In three thousand years, five thousand wars have happened. It simply proves that man is insane, man as he is is not normal. It is very rare to find a normal man; once in a while a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna, a Christ – only once in a while is there a normal man. The whole humanity is insane. But that is not so important. Far more dangerous has been the inner war. In the name of religion people have been taught to fight with themselves, to struggle with themselves. That creates schizophrenia, that creates a split in you: you start fighting with a part of your own being. You cannot defeat it because you are it, and you cannot let it win because that is against your ego. So the war becomes unending and it dissipates energy. It makes people sad instead of joyous. It makes people so dissipated as if all their juice has dried up. They simply live like ghosts or ghosts in machines. They live like robots, dragging somehow. Life becomes a burden, loses all poetry. Life becomes ugly and deep-down one starts hoping for death. The whole cause is that we have not been told to love ourselves; we have been told to hate, to condemn, to judge. We have not been told to be total; we have been told to choose: some parts are good and some parts are bad. Just Around the Corner

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My whole teaching is that nothing is bad in you. And if something appears bad that simply shows that you have not been able to use it in a right way. Rightly used even poison becomes nectar, wrongly used even nectar is bound to become poison. Man is a great experiment: an experiment in tremendous transformation. Man has been given all the potential to be a god but it has to be arranged rightly, used rightly. The instrument is there but one has to learn how to play upon it, only then the melody, only then the music, only then the benediction. And the first lesson of a sannyasin is not to fight with himself. Drop all fighting. Accept yourself. Accept yourself as a great gift of God, with great reverence and gratitude, and then the journey starts. Then transformation is possible. Transformation is possible only in the milieu of acceptance, never when you are in conflict. Become harmonious, be in accord with yourself. Yes, there are roses and there are thorns but both have to be accepted because both are part of the rose bush. And the thorns are not against the roses, they are bodyguards. The real art of life is to transform even the thorn into a rose. But what we have done with man is just the opposite: we have changed even roses into thorns.


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CHAPTER 20


Vedant means that which is beyond scriptures; Satyam means truth. The full name will mean truth which is beyond scriptures. Truth is not something that can be described. Truth is not a theory: it is an experience, an experience so deep, so tremendously intense, so infinite, so mysterious, that no word is adequate to explain it. Not only can words not explain it, they cannot even indicate it, they can’t even give hints. It is like explaining light to a blind man. You cannot explain it, there is simply no way, no method. Light can only be experienced. One who has experienced knows; one who has not experienced can only believe. And belief is very dangerous. Doubt is far more beneficial than belief because doubt goads you towards the journey, it keeps you going in search, in inquiry. Belief helps you to fall asleep, it gives you the false idea that you have already arrived. Belief gives you a conclusion which is rlot yours, which is borrowed from others, from scriptures, from tradition. But a borrowed truth is the greatest lie in the world. Truth can only be true when it is based on your own experience, utterly your own experience. And then it is impossible to describe it. Yes, one can help others to open their eyes. That’s the function of a Master: the Master does not describe, does not explain, does not theorize. The Master simply shocks you, shakes you, into wakefulness. He creates devices so that you can be provoked out of your dreams, so that you can be called forth out of your slumber. The slumber is very very long: one has slept for centuries and centuries; one has been unconscious for lives and lives. Hence great effort is needed to wake a person. Not only is the Master needed, but a community where you can be shocked and shaken from every nook and corner, where you have to face a mirror everywhere, where there is no escape possible, 56

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where you are really trapped and caught and you have to wake up, where to sleep becomes almost impossible. That is the meaning of becoming part of a commune. Initiation into sannyas is becoming part of a commune which is making all kinds of efforts to help people to wake up. Prem means love, Satyo means truth. Love is the only truth. Everything else is secondary; love is primary. Love should be the only target in life. But people go on creating other goals, forgetting love or postponing love, or putting love at the end of their lists. Love should be first because time is short and one cannot be certain about the next moment. This may be the only moment that is available, the next may never come. Tomorrow is uncertain. Love should not be postponed for a single moment. Postponing love is postponing life; postponing love is missing the opportunity. It is only in the deepest experience of love that truth is revealed. God is another name for that experience that happens at the very core, at the very central core of love. Love is the circumference and God is the center of it. But people don’t even touch the circumference, so what to say about the center? They have not experienced love and they go on talking about God. Their talk is utter nonsense – not only nonsense, it is very dishonest. And it is not only that they are deceiving others: they are deceiving themselves, they are deceived by themselves. They are in a kind of self-created deception. Let this be the key for you, that love has to be lived each moment as totally as possible. It is not a question of relationship; it is a question of bringing a certain quality to your being – the quality of friendliness, the quality of compassion towards all that is, the quality of trust for all that is. The man of love is the man of trust, and th man of trust is the man of truth. Sannyas is a quantum leap, a jump into the unknown, a great courage to become discontinuous with your own past. It is a rebirth. It is a change so great... as if the old dies, and dies utterly and totally and the new comes into being from nowhere, from nothingness, out of nothing. If the new comes from the old it remains the old. If the new is continuous with the old then it is only a modification of the old – maybe a little bit colored and decorated and changed, with a new dress, with a new mask, but it is not a revolution, it is not a conversion. And sannyas to be true has to be a revolution so total that the old identity is simply dropped – just as the snake slips out of the old skin and never looks back. It is a psychological slipping out of the past. It is a subtle process and only very intelligent people are capable of doing it. Sannyas can never become a mass movement; it is bound to remain for the chosen few beause the masses cannot gather courage and the masses have sold their intelligence long before. They have settled with small comforts, petty securities. They have lost the spirit of adventure. They cling to their belongings, to their possessions, to their small positions, respectabilities. They have completely forgotten that there is a sky beyond, that there are stars and stars beyond, that there are calls and challenges which have to be faced and encountered, accepted and lived. Just Around the Corner

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They have completely forgotten that life has more meaning than money and power and prestige, that life has a totally different dimension too – that of poetry and dance and celebration. Sannyas makes you aware of the festive dimension of life. It is an effort to dance with the trees and sing with the stars. It is a great longing to be as wild as the ocean, to be as high as the Himalayan peaks. Once this longing takes possession of a person it almost drives him mad. But that madness is far more valuable than the so-called sanity. The so-called sanity is nothing but normal madness. Always remember never to become part of the mob; protect yourself. There are great temptations to become part of the mob. Those are the temptations really, temptations from the devil. There is no other devil but the mass mind; that is the devil. It tempts because it can provide many comforts and securities and respect and honor and everything. But all those are nothing but toys: death will come and take them away. Before death comes one has to know something of the deathless. That’s what sannyas is all about: a search for the deathless, a search for the timeless, a search for eternity, Move into a new dimension of great longing and passion. It has to be very passionate, intense, so that you are totally possessed by the desire, so that every fiber of your being starts pulsating with the desire, so that every atom, every cell, of your body and mind is stirred by the longing. Then the goal is not far away. It depends on our intensity. If the intensity is total the happening is possible instantaneously. It can happen right NOW.


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CHAPTER 21


[A sannyasin says he is trying to live up to his new name: Now I feel very happy and hope I am strong enough to do it in Germany.] Good! Sometimes small changes can bring great changes. Just a small pebble in the lake can create millions of ripples. Life is so interconnected that they say if you destroy a small leaf of grass even the faraway stars are affected. Life is like a spider’s web: you touch one thread anywhere and the whole web starts shaking. And a name, although it is a small thing, is not so small as it appears on the surface – because it is our whole identity, it is our whole past. It is not just a symbol there, it has become very solid. We have made it solid, we have been feeding it for our whole life. The name is not just a name, it becomes a reality. And when you drop the old name it is a death, it is dying to the old. And it is a rebirth, it is beginning anew – with a new vision, a new perspective, a new look at life. It is one of the ancient traditions to change the name of the initiate, to change his dress, to change small things which logically don’t matter much. Whether you wear orange or white logically does not matter. But life is not logical, life is far more than logic can contain; it is supralogical. Just by changing the dress something inside you changes. The policeman in his uniform and the same policemen in ordinary dress are two persons. The general with all his medals... and the same general in his nightgown are not the same people – totally different personal-ities because different identities start functioning. And man is multidimensional; you have many faces. At a certain moment, in a certain con-text, one face shows up and other faces disappear. In another context, in another situation, another

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face surfaces; others disappear. Slowly slowly you have to find that no face is yours; they are all borrowed. You are the one who moves from one face to another. You are not any face in particular. You are the faceless one, you are the nameless one, you are the formless one. But by changing from one face to another there comes a small interval, a gap, where you can have a glimpse of your no-face. The Zen people call no-face, the original face; it is another name for the same thing. And if you ask them ”What is the original face?” they say ”The face that you had before you were born and the face that you will have again when you are dead.” There is a faceless, nameless, formless reality inside you which expresses itself in many ways but which is inexhaustible and is never expressed in its totality. Only a part of it is always manifested and it is always only a part. We become identified with the part and we think that this is the whole. This is the whole misery. Not to become identified with any part and to remain a witness to all that comes and goes, all the changes, is sannyas. Slowly slowly one knows that ”No face is mine.” And when there is no face that you can call yours who are you? The ”I” also starts disappearing. Then only a certain kind of ”amness” remains, a very silent amness, a pure feeling of being. That is God, that pure feeling, and we can all attain to it. I am happy – it has been a good experience for you. Continue groping in the same direction. Much more is going to happen! [To a recently arrived sannyasin] Just go into group, into meditations as deeply as possible; don’t hold anything back. That is the only barrier: people go on holding back. They want to go in and still they keep themselves out. They only go so far, half-heartedly, and with a half-hearted effort nothing, absolutely nothing is possible. The work demands your total being. It demands surrender, dedication. Not even ninety-nine point nine percent will do – exactly one hundred percent and then the ego starts evaporating. And the evaporation of the ego is the whole goal of all meditations, of all methods, of all spiritual exercises. When the ego is gone for the first time you arrive. The death of the ego is your birth. So keep only that in mind: go totally into everything – no strings attached, no conditions, unconditionally. And great is the possibility, great is the opportunity. [A newly-arrived sannyasin doesn’t know just how long she will stay.] Be here! Just be here without any idea of time. That is one of the things that a sannyasin has to forget about – time – because time basically is mind. If you can forget time mind starts disappearing. Hence the insistence of all the Buddhas: live in the moment and don’t think of the morrow. Live right now. That which is gone is gone, don’t look back. And that which has not come yet has not come Just Around the Corner

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yet, there is nothing to look at. And between the two is the small moment. But that is the only truth of life, the truth of existence. So just be here. Forget that time exists and forget the whole world too. When you are here with then I am your whole world. Then miracles are possible. And miracles are very simple things; they are not complicated things. Simple requirements – a loving surrender, a total dedication, a tremendous longing to be transformed – and the miracles start happening. And one miracle brings in another; they happen in a chain. Then slowly slowly the whole of life becomes a garland of miracles. Each moment brings something so miraculous, something so incredible, something so unbelievable, that one cannot even share it with anybody else; one cannot even say it. To say it seems to make it profane, to say it seems to go against its sacredness. To utter it becomes impossible. It can be communicated only in silence. [Osho speaks about the come-close darshans... ] Before we work, a few things for the mediums and for the others too. The word ”energy” is not yet rightly understood. It is one of the incomprehensibles. Physics talks about energy, metaphysics talks about energy, but nobody defines it; it is indefinable. It is as indefinable as God. In fact, it is a new name for God. What we are doing here is creating a harmony of energy in which a few windows which have remained closed for you can become open; a few doors which have remained shut for you can be helped to be opened. If the energy is in harmony, if your energy is in a state of dance, the key suddenly fits the lock. And the key fits in the lock only at a certain state of harmony, never before it. When you are really moving, swaying, dancing, when you are not holding yourself back in any way, when you are offering yourself totally, emptying yourself totally, you will feel, you will hear, the key moving in the lock, the lock opening. You will hear the click, and that click, once heard, can never be forgotten. Then your life starts taking on a new color. After that click you are never the same. That click is very important. And that is the purpose of these ”close-ups”. The society tries in every possible way to move your energy to the left hemisphere of your brain. It is locked there, it is hung-up there. And the left hemisphere of the brain is the most mundane, utilitarian, the marketplace. It calculates, it argues; it is cunning, clever, competitive, violent, male. One hundred percent of the energy is locked in the left hemisphere. Fifty percent of it has to move to the right hemisphere – that’s really what we are trying to do. Only fifty percent of it has to move then the balance arises and the harmony settles and you will hear the click and the opening of the door and the unlocking of the lock. Just Around the Corner

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Darkness is helpful to move the energy from the left hemisphere to the right. That’s why you cannot sleep in light. It is difficult to sleep in light, you need darkness because sleep is part of the right hemisphere. That’s why you are afraid in the dark because the left hemisphere thinks of darkness as the enemy. It is for this change that I tell you to close your eyes, because with open eyes the left hemisphere functions. You are looking extrovertly; you are looking at the world, at objects. With closed eyes a change becomes possible, the right hemisphere starts functioning. Hence all the meditators down the ages have been sitting with closed eyes. Women know the secret. If you hug a woman, if you kiss a woman, she closes her eyes. She immediately moves to the right hemisphere – because love is part of the right hemisphere just as logic is part of the left hemisphere. Music helps; music, poetry, sculpture – all arts belong to the right hemisphere. Hence the musicians are here to help you. And if you start swaying an inner dance of energy starts happening. If you lose yourself and become part of the flood it becomes easier, because the ego, the separation, that ”I am separate from other”, is again ingrained in the left hemisphere. Whenever you lose yourself with somebody – two lovers melting into each other – immediately the left hemisphere is no more the master. In orgasmic states the right hemisphere predominates, becomes the master. Hence the people who have always been calculating and have remained obsessed with the left hemisphere, have all been against sex, against love, against poetry. You will be surprised to know that Plato, the great Greek philosopher, in his vision of a beautiful society, of his utopia, ”The Republic”, debars poets. Poets will not be allowed in his society. And of course if poets are not allowed then painters will not be allowed because painting is nothing but poetry in color. And if poets are not allowed musicians will not be allowed because music is nothing but poetry in sound. And dancers, and sculptors, and all those people who beautify life, who live illogically but live joyously will not be allowed. Mathematicians and scientists will dominate the society. In fact that’s what has already happened: what Plato conceived two thousand years before has already happened and is happening. The poet is dying because the right hemisphere is not getting energy at all. These close-ups are an effort to move the energy from the left to the right. But all depends on you: if you allow it can happen, if you are in a let-go it can happen. It cannot be forced on you. If you are ready to receive then great mutation is possible. And I am not telling you that one hundred percent of the energy has to move, because that will be again a state of lopsidedness – only fifty percent of the energy and a balance arises. And balance is beauty, and balance is music; balance is truth and balance is God. So while you are here with me dissolve in the totality. Don’t keep yourself separate, don’t be an observer. Become a participant, and you can participate only if your eyes are closed. If you keep your eyes open you are not a participant, you are an observer. You remain in the wrong side of your brain, the wrong side in this context, for this space, for this energy. Just Around the Corner

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And don’t sit holding yourself. Sway! Be like a small, innocent child dancing in the wind, under the sun, or in the rains with the trees. Forget that you are human beings. Think of yourself as trees or birds or animals. Forget your egos. Just be! And this is something that can be understood only when it happens to you. It is happening to many people, I would like it to happen to many more. Slowly slowly you all have to become my mediums because we have to turn on the whole world. We have to create such a great energy-field that whosoever enters it is turned on, just by entering. Just by entering inside the gate he will feel as if he has taken LSD. He has to become stoned! (laughter) This is just the beginning of a great experiment; I am just preparing the ground. Contribute to it with your totality....


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First a few words to the mediums and the others also... Albert Einstein is reported to have said that life’s most incomprehensible thing is that it is comprehensible. Yes, there are moments when life is comprehensible – very rare moments, peaks of consciousness. Ordinarily life is incomprehensible. There is no way to figure it out, you cannot make any head nor tail of it. It is simply so mysterious, so baffling that people don’t think about it – out of fear – because to encounter such a baffling, mysterious phenomenon one’s heart starts sinking. One looks so silly, so stupid, one looks so ignorant. That’s why the majority decides never to think about life’s real mysteries. They talk about the weather, they talk about each other’s health; they talk about a thousand and one things but they never talk about the real problems of existence. And the reason is: to bring up the real question of life is to get disturbed, is to get unsettled, is to lose track of all your knowledge, all your clarity. When you face the mystery you feel confused... and nobody wants to feel confused. The easiest way is to keep the mystery out of the way. Scientists say that we allow only two percent of life to enter; ninety-eight percent of life we keep out. No wonder that we are miserable, no wonder that we are dead, no wonder that we are not really alive. If ninety-eight percent of life is kept out we are living at the minimum. And one can live at the maximum! When one hundred percent of life is allowed in to pass through you and you are not afraid of the mysterious and you are not afraid of being baffled and you are not afraid of being ignorant, then life becomes comprehensible. Those are the moments when suddenly everything fits in. Those are the moments when all questions simply disappear. Not that you get an answer – when there is no question how can 64

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there be an answer? Questions evaporate; no answers are needed. You are simply in the know of it, you are simply it. You are so vibrant with it, so full of it, so overflowing with it, that there is no need to know. You are one with it, hence the need to know disappears. You pulsate with life, you vibrate with life, you dance with life, you are in rhythm with life. Those are the moments when life becomes comprehensible. And Albert Einstein is absolutely right – I agree with him – that the most incomprehensible thing about life is that it is comprehensible. It should not be so! To the poets, to the scientists, to the artists it is comprehensible only for fleeting moments. But to the mystics it is comprehensible continuously. Day in, day out, year in, year out, whether they are awake or asleep it is comprehensible. Because they have disappeared, the disturbance has disappeared. The ego is the disturbance, the ego is the barrier that does not allow you to see things as they are. The mystic is no more, hence life is comprehensible. The mystic is no more; there is nobody to disturb, there is nothing to create confusion. And because there is no confusion no clarity is needed. What I am trying to do here is to give you a few moments, those peak moments when life becomes suddenly comprehensible. It is possible only if you move to the optimum; it is possible only when your energy pulsates totally. It is possible only when you are not holding anything back, when you are drunk, when you are madly drunk – drunk with your own energy, drunk with your own existence. Just the sheer beauty of being, the sheer beauty of existing, the sheer beauty that ”I am breathing and my heart is beating”, is more than enough to be grateful, to be absolutely thankful to God or to the whole. These ”close-ups”, these energy communications are just moments for you to move with me to the optimum. If you relax, if you fall in rhythm with me, if you don’t keep yourself apart, the impossible becomes possible. And once you have tasted a few moments then you know that it is within your grasp. Then you can try those moments on your own. I can only give you a flavor, then you have to work it out. This is not the end of the work, this is only the beginning. I can simply open the window for a moment so that you can see that outside is the infinite sky and the stars. But then you have to work it out. Slowly, steadily you have to move and open your own windows, your own doors. But those first glimpses are absolutely necessary. Without those glimpses you will never have the idea of what life can be, what life is. And without the idea there will be no longing. Once you have tasted something, once you have chewed a little experience, once you have digested something of the unknown and it has entered your bloodstream, then you cannot remain at rest. Then you are going to become aflame. Then the great longing to attain to those moments again and again... and then finally not only to attain to those peaks but to abide there. So while you are here with me in these intimate energy communions don’t remain separate. Fall utterly in tune with me. Dance, sway, hum, and be taken away from yourself. Allow me to take you away from yourself. Allow me to pull the earth from beneath you so that you can start falling into the abysmal. Allow me to turn you on into a totally different dimension of which you are not even aware, which you have not even dreamed about. Let me give you a dream, a vision. But it all depends on Just Around the Corner

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you: you can be just a spectator and then you will miss the whole thing. You have to be participants, you have to fall en rapport with me. This is subtle work, very subtle. You cannot see it from the outside. You will see the mediums moving and swaying, but that is nothing. That is only the visible form of something mysterious that is happening within them. Even they will not be able to explain it to you; it is not explainable. It can only be experienced and cannot be explained. So be participants, and not just so-so; that is meaningless – either one hundred percent or nothing. Below one hundred percent nothing ever happens. If you can keep this in mind then I can take you to the ultimate Himalayan peaks of consciousness. And once you have seen those sunlit, virgin peaks you will not like to come back, you will like to remain there. That longing – to abide there forever – is religion. Jesus calls it the kingdom of God, Buddha calls it nirvana; you can choose any name you like. But life is utterly meaningless without those peaks. And life is a turmoil if you go on living in the dark valleys, the dark valleys of mundane existence. These moments are sacred. I am trying to take you to the holiest of the holies, to the innermost shrine of your being. Come with me! Don’t remain spectators.


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CHAPTER 23


Prem means love, Derek means ruler. Let love rule your life, let love be the ruler. Let everything else be just the supreme God of love. There is no other God. All other gods are just myths, inventions of man out of fear and greed. All other gods are false, fictitious. But love is not man’s invention; love is natural. It is given to us from the very beginning. It is our very being, the very ground of our being. But we have made other rulers, other masters – logic, calculation, intellect... they have become the rulers. Love is so silent that it never asserts itself, it simply accepts whatsoever is the case. It keeps quiet. It is a silent force, a passive energy, feminine, non-aggressive. So unless you really become attentive towards it, it remains in the dark, it remains part of the unconscious; it never comes into light. And unless it comes into light there is no light in life. So everything has to be dropped and a space has to be created for love. That’s what sannyas is all about: creating a context for love to surface, creating a space for love to function. The moment love starts functioning, your life has poetry, your life has meaning; your life has God in it. Anand means bliss. Bliss is the ultimate state of consciousness. It is not happiness. Happiness always has its opposite. unhappiness. with it. Happiness can exist only through unhappiness; they cannot be separated. The happy person is carrying the seeds of unhappiness in him and vice versa: the unhappy person is carrying the seeds of happiness in him. Happiness and unhappiness are like a wheel, spokes of the same wheel. Sometimes one comes to the top and the other goes to the bottom, then the other comes to the top; and so on, so forth, the wheel goes on moving. But they are not separate, they are inseparable. And that’s what man tries to do his whole life, to separate them – which is not possible in the very nature of things. Hence those who try are doomed to fail.

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Bliss is not happiness. Bliss is transcendence of the duality of happiness and unhappiness. It is go-ing beyond both, it is dropping both, it is getting free of both. The desire to be happy brings unhappiness, it is bound to bring it in. We go on trying not to be unhappy and we go on trying to be happy. We only create a mess out of our lives. Seeing it – that they are together like two aspects of the same energy, two sides of the same coin – seeing it, a great understanding arises. That understanding is bliss. It is neither against unhappiness nor for happiness, it is simply unidentified with both. It is just a witnessing state. Happiness comes: you witness it, you don’t get identified. You don’t say ”I am happy”; you say ”Happiness is passing by.” Unhappiness comes: you don’t say ”I am unhappy”; you say ”Unhappiness is passing by.” You remain the seer, utterly cool, collected, calm. That state is bliss. And Winfried means a friend of peace. Only a blissful person can be a friend of peace. The unblissful can never be a friend of peace. The unblissful knowingly, unknowingly is bound to create conflict, hatred, anger, rage, jealousy. All kinds of poisons are bound to arise out of his being because he is full of poison. He is going to radiate poison, he is going to radiate death, whatsoever he may believe. That is one thing. He may think that he is a great lover but his love will be something else: his love will be possessiveness, his love will be domination. He may think that he is a great servant of people and all his service will be nothing but a subtle ego-trip. He may think he is humble and his humbleness will be nothing but a new kind of pride. He may not know it, that is not the point; he may remain completely unconscious about all this, but if he is not blissful whatsoever he is going to do in the world is going to bring more and more misery, more and more war, more and more turmoil. He is going to create a more and more insane world around himself. Only a blissful person can be a friend of peace. He is; there is no question that he can be. He cannot be otherwise; he simply is a friend of peace. Peace flows through his being. He radiates peace, he vibrates peace, he pulsates peace. He becomes a blessing to the world. To be blissful inside is to be a blessing for the whole world. Prem means love, buddha means awakening – the awakening of love. And that’s the greatest revolution in life: when love awakens, when the heart starts singing songs of love. Ordinarily love is fast asleep; only logic works. And logic is mechanical, it is like a computer. Sooner or later man will not need his head: the computer will do the same work far more quickly, far more efficiently, far more reliably. In fact already computers have arrived which are far more efficient than man and his mind. They are going to take his place, they are going to replace man. Unless love awakens in man, man is going to become out of date, man is going to become just useless, only worth throwing in the junk yard. Man’s own machines are now his competitors. It has been easy to fight with the animals, it is not going to be easy to fight with the machines. Man has created his own greatest enemy. And there is no going back, we cannot go back. Machines are going to become better and better. All that is needed is awakening of love so that man can do something which machines cannot do. That will be the only supremacy that man can have over machines. Logic, calculation, arithmetic, history, geography, physics, chemistry – all that is not going to prove man higher than the machines. Just Around the Corner

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Only one thing – love, and a few things which grow around love: poetry, music, dancing, painting... That is going to be the future, that is the only hope for man. If love cannot be awakened then man is finished. Then this century will see the end of humanity on the earth. Man may still live but he will be secondary to the machine; the machine will be the ruler. Man may still exist but he will not be a human being. He will not have that glory – the glory of a Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed – not at all. He will be a worthless creature, condemned in his own eyes. It will not be a surprise if he commits suicide. Of course when he commits suicide he will commit it with a method, with some excuses, great rationalizations: a war between capitalism and communism, a war between East and West, a war between this and that, this ideology and that ideology. He will find beautiful excuses to commit suicide. In fact that’s what he is trying to prepare for. In this dark night that prevails on the earth there is only one hope: if love is awakened then man can still regain his lost glory. That is the meaning of your name – the awakening of love – and that’s my work here.


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Veet means beyond, Shastro means scriptures. Truth is beyond all scriptures, beyond all words, beyond all theories, philosophies. That is one of the most fundamental things to remember because man gets lost in words, and words can prove very dangerous, very fascinating, very alluring, very hypnotizing. The word ”God” has become so important that people are ready to die for it or to kill for it. And the word ”God” is not God, the word is merely a word. You can call God by another name: Mohammedans call it Allah, Hindus call it Ishwar. There are three thousand languages on the earth and each language has many names for God. Sufis have one hundred names for God and Hindus have one thousand names for God. Hindus have devoted a whole scripture just to names – Vishnu Sahasranam: One Thousand Names of God. God is not a word but an experience. One need not believe in it; one has to be open to existence to feel it. It is a feeling, not a thought. But down the ages man has been deceived by the so-called learned people, pundits, scholars, priests. Their whole business has depended on creating more and more complicated theories about God. And God is a simple experience, so simple that it is indefinable. It is like the color yellow. If somebody asks you ”What is yellow?” what can you say more than that yellow is yellow? It is indefinable. You can point out to him a yellow flower but that is not defining it. It is so simple that no definition is possible. Defini-tion is possible only when something is complex, complicated. And the priests have played upon words. There is an ancient parable that George Gurdjieff used to tell his disciples again and again. Once it happened that a few ants, explorer ants, discovered a picnic party in the forest. They had never seen 70

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such beautiful food; they were wild ants – they had never smelt anything like this. It was ecstatic! They had never seen such color. They went berserk. But it was their duty and their work to inform the community, so they rushed back. They informed the community about the colors and the flavors and the food and the taste. Just seeing their ecstasy and the way they were describing it there was a panic, pandemonium. All the ants became so excited that all work stopped and they were all talking about food and flavor and color. The elders became anxious, concerned. This was too dangerous! The peace of the community was in danger. So they told the other ants ”Wait! Let us first go and see what is the matter and then we will bring the right message to you and tell you what has to be done.” They went and they found that the explorer ants were right: the food was really absolutely unknown. Even in their long lives they had never seen or heard of such a thing. Not even in their beautiful ancient stories was such food mentioned not even in their mythology. It was simply incredible! They were really afraid that to tell other ants would become a danger: they would come and they would go mad. They would not be able to bear such ecstasy. Some way had to be found. They found a way. On a paper napkin they made a map of the table on which the food was arranged. They colored the map. They rubbed the food on the paper so a little smell started coming and then they carried the map to the community. And the map was enough: the community went mad! They jumped and danced and they searched over the whole map. They talked about the lines and the beautiful curves and the colors and the smell. And they completely forgot about asking where the real thing was. It is said they are still arguing about the map, still searching on the map and trying to find the food. It must be hiding somewhere there because the smell is there. Yes, words can carry a little smell, a little flavor. When Buddha says something the word carries his flavor. For centuries it carries something alive, something vibrant in it. When Jesus speaks the poetry will go on resounding down the ages. But even the words of a Jesus or a Buddha are mere words, maps – not the real food. One has to be beyond them. Maps are good if they help you to go beyond. They are dangerous if you become obsessed too much with them. That is the meaning of your name: go beyond all scriptures. Veet means going beyond, gyan means knowledge – going beyond all knowledge. God cannot be known. God can be lived, loved, but cannot be known. Knowledqe is a superficial relationship. Knowledge exists between the subject and the object. The knower and the known have to be separate; only then is knowledge possible. But with God we are not separate, we are one. The subject and the object are the same. The observer is the observed, the knower is the known. Hence no knowledge is possible. We are part of God and God is part of us. We are manifestations of God – there is not even an inch’s difference. We have forgotten the fact, that is true; we have no remembrance of it, that is true. But just by forgetting it nothing is changed. You may forget your eyes but they are there; you may forget your hands but they are there. In some deep ecstasy you may forget your body but it is there. In sleep you forget every day but in the morning you find it again: it is there. Just Around the Corner

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We are a metaphysical sleep: we have forgotten who we are. Hence we try to know God. That is utter nonsense! And because we cannot know we decide that God does not exist: if he had been there we would have known. We start with a wrong step and we automatically reach a wrong conclusion. From the very beginning it has to be understood: God cannot be known because we are it. We can realize God, we can be it, but we cannot know it. Hence the path towards God is not of knowledge but of meditation, not of learning but of unlearning, not of knowledge but of wisdom. And wisdom is not knowledge. Wisdom is utterly empty of all knowledge. Knowledge is like dust covering a mirror; wisdom is a mirror without any dust. Wisdom simply means that you are so silent, so without mind, so without noise, that that which is reveals itself on its own, is reflected. The stance of a knower is a wrong beginning. Be a lover, not a knower. And that’s what sannyas is all about. I teach love. I teach life. I don’t teach knowledge, I am not a teacher of knowledge. I will help you to unlearn whatsoever you know. I will take all that you know away from you. I will unburden you. I will destroy your knowledge so that you can be freed from its bondage. And the moment one comes to a point of unlearning is the moment of revelation. When the mind is utterly absent, God is absolutely present. [To a recently arrived sannyasin Feel at home. Be as relaxed as possible, because things happen only when you are relaxed. If you are tense nothing happens. To be tense means to be closed; to be relaxed means to be open, vulnerable. This is an energy-field. If you are open, vulnerable, you will soak up energy. It will sink deep into you, it will reach to your very core. You have to be here like a sponge. So just feel very relaxed, as if no worry exists, no world exists, no problems exist. For these few days that you will be here be utterly calm and quiet. There is nothing to attain, nothing to achieve, no goal to reach. Enjoy moment to moment the sheer joy of being. And much is going to happen. [To a sannyasin on his first visit] Just be totally here and allow me to reach the innermost core of your being. Don’t resist, don’t come in the way. Don’t stand between me and you. Remove yourself, and then things start happening so easily, without any effort. And when things happen without any effort they have a tremendous beauty, just like a bud opening and becoming a flower.


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This is your new name: Swami Anand Prartho. Anand means blissful, Prartho means prayer. The word ”prayer” comes from the same root as Prartho – a blissful prayer. And that is the most incredible thing that can happen in life to a man. Even love is not that far out; even love falls short, even love remains human. Prayer is a flight into the divine. It is love evaporating into the divine. It is love going beyond the gravitation of the earth. It is the most mysterious experience of life – indefinable, elusive, but experienceable. One cannot do prayer, it is not an action; one can only be in prayer, it is a state of being. If one is doing prayer one is simply moving through empty gestures, one is following a ritual; and all rituals are dead; and no ritual is capable of containing the aliveness of prayer. It is so alive that it escapes all confinements, all limitations. Prayer is not intellectual, verbal. It is a silent bowing down of the being, silent gratitude in the heart. But the silent part is the most essential part of it. The moment you say it, you have profaned it; the moment you say it you have gone astray. Bring words in and the prayer goes out: it is a wordless experience – because with the words comes the mind, the intellect, and prayer has nothing to do with intellect at all; it is utterly non-intellectual. And when I say that it is non-intellectual I don’t mean that it is emotional. Emotion is a feminine part of intellect; intellect is the masculine part of emotion. Emotion and intellect are not really opposites – but are two aspects of the same coin. Hence the intellectual can be changed into the emotional any moment and the emotional can become the intellectual any moment. Just let the intellectual drink a little more alcohol and he becomes emotional and cries and hugs and... It was just there! Prayer is neither intellectual nor emotional. Prayer is a transcendence of all duality. It is a state of witnessing, of becoming aware – nothing to say, nothing to do, but just to be. 73

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Just the other day I was reading Buckminster’s version of the Lord’s Prayer – very intellectual and very stupid, stupid because it is very intellectual. I had never expected such a silly thing from this man Buckminster Fuller. I had hoped that he would show a little more sense. The prayer starts with definitions, prayer stars with scientific definitions! He uses one word and then he defines it; twenty lines of definition follow it. If he says ”God”, immediately he says ”What I mean by God” – it is a prayer! – ”I mean four things by God”, and then he describes each thing. He says ”All glory is the Lord’s” and then he immediately defines what glory is – as if he is teaching God what glory is. And then he goes on a long dissertation of glory, God, of what he means by ”mystery”, of what he means by this... It is a long dissertation but there is nothing of prayer in it. When he has defined everything then he says ”Now Lord, I can address you, because all definitions have been made, everything has been explained, now I can address you. ” But then too it remains the same intellectual thing. There is no God in it, no feel for God. There is no heart in it. It is very insensitive and utterly unaware of what prayer is – defining God and glory and this and that, and utterly unaware of prayer. Seeing it, reading it, I felt sorry for the man, really sorry for the man. He has not experienced a single moment of prayer. Now he has gone beyond eighty – world-famous in many ways, respected in many ways – but has missed the real point of life. So prayer is not any intellectual effort on your part. It is just a blissful dance for no reason at all. It is sheer joy just for being’s sake. Just because we are it is enough, it is more than enough to be prayerful, to be thankful. And God knows no language so there is no need to bring language in; one can be utterly silent with God. That is the beauty of the communion called prayer: it can be utterly silent and yet it can say all that you can never say through words. [The new sannyasin says: I had the experience of the oneness of all thing, and also in Zazen the experience of emptiness. How can I intensify and deepen those experiences so as to integrate them into my everyday life?] The moment you ask how it will become more and more difficult. This is one of the most fundamental problems for the seeker to encounter and to settle with. Once you experience something a natural desire to experience it again and again arises – not only to experience it but to experience it on deeper levels, higher levels. And it is a natural desire – I am not finding fault with it, it is absolutely natural. But then it becomes the barrier, because the first time the experience happened you were not expecting it. That was the basic condition of its happening: it could happen because you were not expecting it. It took you unawares, it came as a surprise. Now you are clever about it, knowledgeable about it. Now you have known it. Now deep down you are demanding that it should be given to you again, that it should come not only as it had come before but even in a better way. All these demands in the mind and desires in the mind will destroy the very possibility; they will not allow the space for it to happen again. So the seeker has to learn a great thing: experience things and forget all about them. Don’t carry them with you, don’t let them hang around you. Good that you experienced something; be thankful to God and be finished with it. Don’t let it become a psychological memory otherwise it will not allow you to go even to the same depth again – to say nothing about going higher or deeper. Just Around the Corner

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And the more it is not happening, the more you will be desiring, and the more tense you will become, and more and more angry: ”Why is it not happening? When it has happened once, then why not now, why not again and again?” You will make it impossible. Forget about it! It was beautiful – thank God and be again as if it had not happened. This is the whole art of the meditator: to always function from the state of not-knowing. Never function from the state of knowledge. Never allow your past experience to encumber you, to burden you. Never allow the past experience to become a screen between you and the reality. Go on dying to the past each and every moment. When something beautiful happens thank God, say ”Amen” and be finished. That is the meaning of amen: that now this is the full stop. I close this chapter here and now. I will never ask for it again. And it will happen again and again. It happens only in that context of not-knowing, of that space called innocence. Your experience has contaminated you. It has destroyed your innocence. When it happened you were innocent; naturally it had a totally different quality. Since then you have become experienced. Now you have to become unexperienced again – that is the how. Forget about it! And many more times many more things will happen; always remember to forget them. Remain open, available, expectant but without any expectation. Mm? It is a very subtle distinction – expectant but without any expectation: alert, watchful so nothing is missed, not asleep, awake, waiting, patiently waiting, but not demanding, not putting conditions on reality, not asking that it should be like this, like that, it should be higher, deeper. No, that is not for us to do. Leave it to God. It is always a grace. It happens only when you are innocent. It certainly happens, and it will happen many more times and each time it will go deeper. But each time you will have to learn to become more and more innocent because the deeper it goes, the greater a natural longing to expect will arise. Hence as the person deepens in his inner search more and more problems have to be faced, greater problems with each new experience. The ordinary person is in a state of blessedness because he has very ordinary problems to solve, mundane: money, power, prestige. They can be solved; it is not a big deal. But if you start on the interior journey greater and greater problems are waiting for you. And this is one of the greatest problems: how to get rid of a beautiful experience. It hurts; even to think about forgetting it hurts. It does not look right; it seems ungrateful. One wants to remember it again and again. It is such a fulfillment, it gives you joy to remember it. But it makes you past-oriented, it makes you past-possessed. It takes you away from the present and it closes you to the future. Forget about it, die to it and things are going to happen far bigger than you have ever imagined, ever experienced. Anand means blissful, Satyam means truth. Truth is always blissful. And untruth always brings misery, although it promises to bring bliss. But it never delivers the goods, it cannot. Untruth pretends, poses, has beautiful masks. Hence the majority of people follow it. Just Around the Corner

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Truth is naked, with no masks, with no garments. And truth never promises. It delivers but it never promises. To follow truth means to follow something without any expectation; to follow truth means to go into the unknown, the uncharted. One never knows what is going to turn up. One never knows where one is going to land. To follow truth is to go into insecurity. But insecurity is freedom, insecurity is life; and insecurity is another name for God.


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Enough of war! Man has lived too much in violence. The time has come, it is absolutely the right time to take the quantum leap from war to love. Either man decides to take the quantum leap or he’ll have to commit suicide. Only love can save him. War is utterly meaningless today. In the past it was not so meaningless because it was not total. Man could fight and yet survive. Man has survived; we have survived five thousand wars! So only a part was going to die, it was possible to afford that much. Now it is impossible to afford because the whole is going to die, the whole planet earth, the whole of humanity. And not only the whole of humanity but the whole of life as such. The birds, the animals, the trees, all that exists and breathes will not exist, will not breathe any more. If war is going to happen then the whole earth is going to become a graveyard, and a graveyard of great aspirations. All the aspirations of the Bud-dhas, Christs, Krishnas will die with it. All those great dreams of bringing a paradise on earth will die with it. And the death of man will be the greatest calamity that can happen to the universe. It is not only a question of the earth, the universe will lose something of great potential. It will take millions of years to evolve human consciousness again. It has been a long journey to arrive at human consciousness, and to destroy it for no reason at all, to destroy it just out of sheer stupidity, to destroy it because of the old habit of constantly quarreling, fighting, to destroy it in the name of ideologies, religions and all that nonsense, is so patently foolish that no man of intelligence can be in favor of it. Anand means bliss, blissful. Socrates has no literal meaning but has great existential meaning. My sannyasin has to be a Socrates, the spirit of Socrates. Socrates represents rebellion against tradition, against the past, against all that is dead. Socrates represents inquiry not belief, exploration not superstition. Socrates represents adventure, adventure into the unknown, even at the risk of life. 77

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Socrates represents the spirit of truth at whatsoever the cost, because nothing can be more valuable than truth. Not even life is more valuable than truth. Life can be sacrificed for truth but truth cannot be sacrificed for life. And the person who is ready to sacrifice his whole being for truth attains to great integration, becomes a soul. The Socratic spirit is the spirit of inquiry, questioning, exploring. It is going into the facticity of life and existence. It is not cheap. Cheap are the religions: you can simply believe. nothing is required of vou. You are born in a Christian family, you are a Christian; you are born in a Hindu family, you are a Hindu. All those beliefs are borrowed. Churches, temples, mosques, represent something ugly, something that is very destructive of human spirit, because the spirit is born only when you rebel, when you rebel against all that is wrong, when you rebel against all that goes contrary to truth, when you rebel against all that makes you a slave. And that rebellion is religion. My sannyas is not that of faith, it is not that of belief. I don’t teach you any dogmas, I don’t give you any doctrines. I am not here to indoctrinate you. I am not here to condition you in a certain way, for certain belief patterns. On the contrary I am here to destroy all conditionings, all beliefs, all superstitions so that your spirit can be free – free from the past, free from others – so that you can be an individual. And the birth of the individual is the greatest experience in life. That is the beginning of the spiritual journey. Only the individual can reach God. The person who lives as part of a crowd cannot reach God. Crowds have never been known to become enlightened, only individuals. So let this become your vision, your very style of thinking, living. Be a blissful Socrates! Each man is a seed of Christ because each man can become Christ. Christ has nothing to do with Jesus as such. Just as Jesus could become Christ, you can. Christ is not a personal name, it is the name of the ultimate state of consciousness. Christ means the crowned one: one who has been crowned by God, one who has attained to the ultimate, one who has fulfilled himself to the furthest and the deepest core of his being, one who is able to return back to the home, whose journey is complete. Adam is expelled from paradise, that is, from the home. Jesus is received back. Jesus is nothing but Adam coming back home. The only difference between Adam and Jesus is that Adam has fallen a victim of knowledge. He has become knowledgeable by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And knowledge is a kind of sleep; he has fallen asleep. Now he no more feels, he only knows. He is hung up in the head, he has lost track of his heart. And the moment you lose track of your heart you lose contact with paradise. You lose contact with your home because the heart is the home, is paradise. God resides there in the heart, not in the head. Expulsion from paradise simply means that the energy has moved from the heart and has become entrapped in the head. Adam’s back is towards God and Jesus’ face is towards God; that’s the only difference. Adam is moving away from the heart and Jesus is moving towards the heart. It is the same person, it is the Just Around the Corner

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same entity. They both represent each of us. You are Adam when you are hung up in the head; you are Jesus when you start descending towards the heart. And when you have reached the heart, when you are welcomed back into the home, you are Christ, you are the crowned one. Be blissful, because the possibility of being a Christ is the greatest bliss, the greatest gift of God to us. And be blissful because the journey is long and only the blissful ones are capable of covering it. The miserable ones become tired too soon, the miserable ones become hopeless too soon. The miserable ones lose inspiration, aspiration too soon. The journey can be completed only if you go dancing, laughing. And it is a hard journey; it is arduous, it is painful. So unless you are smiling and laughing and dancing you will not be able to bear it. To bear a Christ within your heart is like a Woman becoming pregnant. Those nine months are going to be hard, but because she loves, because she is happy and feeling fulfilled in being a mother, she sings, she dances. All the pain of those nine months, and the weight and the illnesses are not agony to her but on the contrary she is ecstatic. The same is the situation with each of us: we are pregnant with God and the journey is long and those nine months can be nine lives. It all depends on us, with what intensity we search and seek. Those nine months can be reduced to nine days or even to nine moments or even to a single split second. It depends on our totality. If one can be really ecstatic it can happen right now; one need not wait for it. The seed can suddenly become the flower. There is no need for it to go through the who!e process of becoming a tree. That is the meaning of conversion: the seed suddenly becoming a flower. That is the meaning of transformation. That is real mutation, real revolution. And sannyas is nothing else. It is a learning for that great revolution, it is preparing for that great revolution, so that you can give birth to Christ in your being. [The new sannyasin says: I have a problem of stuttering, and sometimes I have a great fear, especially in the presence of people I like and also people who are beautiful – women. During the last days here I want to do something about this problem.] Mm mmmm. Do one thing: start deliberately stuttering. Deliberately try to stutter. Here, try with everybody. Enjoy! And it will be gone, it will be gone. It is a simple thing. (much laughter) Whomsoever you meet, deliberately stutter as much as you can! Puzzle him, confuse him! (much laughter) And enjoy it. Before you go it will be gone! [A sannyasin says: I sometimes feel the flower within me blossoming, but very often it feels closed and hard.] Mm mm. It is natural. It is a rhythm like day and night, summer and winter. You have to accept both. Sometimes it is a bud closed and sometimes it is a flower open. Both are good. Don’t reject Just Around the Corner

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anything; not even the negative has to be rejected. The negative has to be absorbed – that is the real art. One can be positive by rejecting the negative but then one will always remain half. One will never be whole and never be holy either. The negative has to be absorbed, digested. The negative has to enhance the positive, enrich the positive, has to become its strength, its energy, its nourishment. So don’t be worried about it. When you feel closed it is okay to be closed. Accept it. That is the time for rest. Otherwise when will you rest? If the flower is open twenty-four hours a day soon it will wither. It needs a little rest. So in the morning the lotus opens; by the evening when the sun sets the lotus closes. For the whole night it is in a deep sleep, closed. In the early morning it will open again; it will be fresh, young, rejuvenated. That’s what we do: the whole day we are awake; in the night we are asleep. That sleep is a must: it makes you capable of being awake again next morning. Always remember that life exists between polarities, and both the polarities are essential, absolutely essential. Rejecting any is very dangerous. One becomes lop-sided, one becomes unbalanced. And to be unbalanced is to be sick – spiritually sick. To be unbalanced is to be mad. To be balanced, utterly balanced is what sanity is all about. So one has to find a balance between the day and the night, between closedness and openness, between joy and sadness, between warmth and coldness. And that is so on each level of life. If you accept both sooner or later a new phenomenon will start happening: you will become a witness of both. By accepting the witness arises. Then you are neither worried when you are closed nor exhilarated too much when you are open: nothing to be worried about, nothing to be ecstatic about. Then silence descends and one is simply a witness of whatsoever happens. One simply takes note of what is happening and remains unperturbed, undistracted. That is transcendence, that is the ultimate goal. At that point one becomes a Buddha, one becomes really awakened. So don’t be worried about it. Relax, accept. All is good, all can only be good.


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Man is a bridge, a bridge between the animal and God, a bridge between two infinities – matter and consciousness. Man is not a being but a bridge. A being is complete; man is not complete. Man has to become bridged, man has to go a long way yet. Man is only a passage to be passed over, to be surpassed. Man is not a being but a becoming. God is a being and the rock is a being, but man is between the two – the rock and God. Unless this is continuously remembered man loses the very point of his existence. It has to be remembered that we are arrows. We can’t be static, we have to go on moving: there are goals to be achieved, targets to be penetrated, promises to be fulfilled. And man is not only a bridge but a love bridge, because it is through love that the rock can become God. Love is the alchemy that the rock has to pass through. It is love that can transform the animal into the divine. There is no other process for the transformation. Remember these two things: that you have not yet happened, that you have to happenb yet, that you have to be, that you are still fast asleep, that you have to become awake; that it is still dark and night and we have to grope for the dawn. And the only way of finding the dawn is through love. So remember: you are a bridge, and a bridge of love. If these two things are remembered, God is not very far away. If this remembrance becomes a constant phenomenon like breathing – whether you are awake or asleep it continues, it becomes a constant milieu around you, your very flavor – then God is not far away. Then the journey of one thousand miles can be completed in a single step. And that step is sannyas. It is a desire to sur pass oneself. And that is the beauty and the glory of man... because man is the only animal who can envision surpassing himself. No dog can do it, no 81

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tiger can do it, no elephant can do it. They cannot imag-ine that they can be more than they are, that there is more to life than they know. It is the glory of man, the dignity of man, that man can envision, can dream of, can aspire to, can long for, something bigger, for something higher. That longing is the root cause of all the religions. That longing is the seed out of which religions sprout. Anand neans bliss; Eva means life. Bliss is life; misery is death. And because millions of people have decided to live in misery they are not really alive. They only live so so, their life is only apparent. Deep down they are dead: their heart is dead, their spirit is dead, their God is dead. They are not flowing with existence. They are stagnant pools, not rivers. And only rivers can meet the ocean; only rivers can go into the beyond, into the unknown. They have no juice in their lives. They are dry, desertlike; not even an oasis exists in them. And the whole cause of it is that they have decided to be miserable – for certain reasons, of course. Misery has a few things: it has security, safety. It keeps you imprisoned, but very safe. It keeps you dead, but very comfortable. It does not allow you adventures because they are dangerous, but without being adventurous one cannot be alive. Life is in adventure. Life is in constant inquiry. Life is not a belief but a deep exploration for truth. And life knows no confinement, no limitation. It constantly goes on beyond, it breaks all the boundaries and all the limitations. Then there is ecstasy and the thrill of being. And then one is as blissful as the stars, as the flowers, as the birds, as the trees. It is our birthright but we have not chosen it. We are free to choose: we can choose misery, we can choose bliss; we can choose life, we can choose death. And because of this freedom we have fallen into the trap of misery. We have believed in its promises. And the whole society supports it: the church, the state, the education system, they all support it. They support a comfortable life, secure, safe, conformist. Be a Christian, be a Hindu, be a Mohammedan. Go to church – just ritualistically, formally, as a social formality. Don’t get involved in religion or things like that; they are dangerous. Don’t get involved in things like love; they are dangerous. Marraige is safe but marriage is miserable. And don’t get involved in the world of beauty, poetry, music because they are all intoxicants. They can make one tremendously drowned in them, drunk in them. So keep to the world of money and power and prestige; they are controllable. You can possess money but you cannot possess music: music will possess you! You can manage marriage: you cannot manage love. Love is so vast, it will be just beyond your grasp. You will be drowned in it, you will be gone into it, you will be mad in it. You will forget all arithmetic and all calculation. Hence the society teaches you safer ways. And we think that by being safe we will be happy, we will be joyful. That is utter nonsense. Joy is in exploration; bliss is in constant inquiry. Life is in journeying; life is in being a wanderer. Life is always in risking, and the more one can risk, the more one can be alive. If one can risk totally then one can have God. God is the total risk, the ultimate risk. My work here consists in helping you to take the jump into the ultimate risk. Just Around the Corner

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Deva means divine; Sebastian means majestic. God is the ultimate magic, the ultimate majesty, the ultimate miracle. Logically, God should not be. That’s why logicians go on saying that there is no God. If they have to be sincere and true to their science of logic they have to deny God. But logic is not synonymous with life; life is more than logic. And God is even more than life. Life is only one expression of God, only one aspect, one facet, just one side of the diamond. There are other sides too. and as you go deeper into the search you will become aware of many more dimensions As you go into the depth you become aware of tremendous treasures of which you were simply oblivious, of which you had never even dreamed. God is splendor, infinite splendor. And without God life cannot have any meaning. It will have logic but it will not have any meaning. It will be mathematical but it will be utterly senseless. It will be measurable but without any music in it. It will be possible to study and observe it in the science lab but there will be no poetry in it. Without religion, poetry, music, dance – everything that is significant disappears. And religion is rooted in the experience of the splendor, the multidimensional splendor of existence. Everything is so utterly beautiful, so exquisite, unbelievably beautiful. And everything has such a benediction around it, such grace, that one who has a little sensitivity is bound to become aware of it. The sound of running water, and the wind passing through the pine trees, and a single bird on the wing, and two lovers just sitting silently by the side of the river... It is so sacred, it is so holy! Sebastian has all those meanings: majestic, revered, sacred, holy. It is a beautiful word. Let it become your meditation. Let it become your experience. Try to be open to the magic of life. Remain available to God. Even though he comes illogically, remain available. That is the most difficult thing in life: to accept something which comes illogically. But God cannot come logically. Logic is our game; he has nothing to do with it. It is our small minds that have created logic and all its rules. It is like chess: rules are ours and everything that we have made out of it is ours. It has nothing to do with existence. Logic is nothing but intellectual chess. God need not fit into it, has no obligation to fit into it. A sannyasin has to learn this tremendously significant thing that God comes illogically and we have to be open to receive him. We are not to impose conditions: ”We will accept you only if you come logically”; ”Unless you can be measured we will not believe you”; ”Unless we can test you in a test tube we are not going to trust you.” If these are our conditions then God will remain unavailable. And without God your life has nothing in it. It is just zero, utter emptiness. It is a graveyard; it is death. Bring God in and things start breathing. Bring God in and seeds start sprouting. Bring God in and your life has a dance and your life has significance. And for the first time one feels what a gift, what a tremendously valuable gift has been given to us, and we have not even thanked God for it. Prem means love; Patrick means noble – noble love. Love makes one noble. Nobility has nothing to do with birth. One is not born noble; one can become. One may not become; one may miss. And Just Around the Corner

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one cannot become noble by intellect. Intellect is cunning and mean. That’s why the more the world is becoming intellectual, the more mean and ugly it is becoming. More and more human beings are losing their humanness and behaving in a subhuman way. Man becomes noble not by the head but by the heart. When the heart opens up it brings nobility. And the opening of the heart is what love is all about. Love is the fragrance of the open heart. When the lotus of the heart opens great fragrance is released: that fragrance is love. By love I don’t mean a love-relationship, no. By love I mean a state of love, the fragrance of love. The fragrance may be in reference to somebody, may not be in reference to somebody; that is secondary. Relationship is secondary, it is not primary; but the state of love is primary. And one can be totally alone and yet immensely loving. That love gives you a new birth. It makes you noble. It makes you truly human. It brings dignity, grandeur.


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Anand means bliss; Jorrit means a Farmer. Once a farmer asked Buddha ”I never see you doing anything. What is your work? What are you doing in the world?” Buddha laughed and he said ”I am also a farmer, but my farming is invisible. I sow the seeds of bliss and love and truth. For them different eyes are needed to see, a different kind of perception is needed. Hence on the surface,” Buddha said, ”you may think I am not doing anything, but I am also a farmer just as you are. ”Your farming is in the visible; my farming is in the world of the invisible.” To be a sannyasin is to be a farmer, sowing seeds of bliss, truth, joy, celebration. And not only sowing seeds – helping them to grow, nourishing them, watering them. And one day the moment certainly comes when one can reap the crop. That moment is called God. That moment of reaping the crop of bliss is itself God. God is not a person but that experience, that experience of utter bliss and ecstasy that one is totally drowned in, lost forever, gone beyond the point of no return. To be a sannyasin means a great work in the inner world. It is the beginning of a new life. And much has to be done. It is arduous; it is an uphill task. But it is worth it because when you reach the Sunlit peaks then you know that whatsoever you have done is nothing compared to what you have gained. Satyam means truth; Matthias means a gift of God. Truth is always a gift of God. It is not attained through human effort; it is not something that we can achieve. We can receive it but we cannot achieve it. It is not a byproduct of our effort; it is the ultimate outcome of our surrender.

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God is always giving but we go on missing because we are not on the receiving end. God is continuously showering but we are not open. We are like buds, not like flowers, hence we go on missing the sunrays which are ready to dance on the petals. Hence we go on missing the butterflies which are ready to come and visit us. And we go on missing the utter joy of releasing the fragrance that is hidden in our beings. Truth is a happening. All that is needed on our part is an opening towards it. And we are very closed. Our religions make us closed, our ideologies make us closed, our belief systems make us closed. Without knowing anything of truth we have gathered too much rubbish about truth. And one can go on collecting great information about truth, that is not going to help. To know about truth is not to know truth. We have to drop all that information that has been forced on us or which we may have gathered on our own. We have to become utterly innocent and empty of knowledge. The moment we start functioning from the state of not knowing we are ready to receive. Blessed are those who are capable of not-knowing. That’s what Socrates means when he says ”I know only one thing, that I know nothing.” But that is the moment when the bud opens because there is nothing to keep it closed any more. And suddenly all that was missing arrives, all that was not fitting fits. Suddenly one is no more fragmentary; one becomes integrated. Suddenly one is part of this great celebration called the universe. But this does not mean that you have just to be lazy about it, that you have just to be a fatalist about it: ”What can we do? – if it is a happening, whenever it happens, it will happen.” This paradox has to be understood: truth cannot be achieved through effort; that is the first part of the paradox. And the second part is: much effort has to be done. Truth cannot be achieved with effort and it cannot be achieved without effort either. The paradox is only apparent; if you go deeply into it it is not a paradox. All your efforts to achieve make you aware that you have to drop efforts. When you have put every thing at the stake, when you have got totally involved in the search, at that peak moment when the involvement is absolute, the realization happens that ”It is not possible through my effort.” And in that very realization effort disappears. But that moment is not of inactivity. There is no action but there is great alertness. It is not a lazy moment; it is not a kind of sleep. One is passive yet - tremendously full of energy, vibrant, overflowing. Action is not there but great energy is there. And that energy is released only when you have made all the efforts that you can make. Effort brings you to the moment of effortlessness, and effortlessness makes you available to God. So effort is not absolutely unnecessary, remember. It is not a condition to attain truth but it is a condition to attain effortlessness. It is just like when for the whole day you have been working hard, then in the night you move into a very very deep sleep. But if you have rested the whole day then in the night you will toss and turn and there will be no deep sleep possible. The whole day’s effort makes it possible for you to relax.


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Exactly the same is the case with truth. Do whatsoever you can do, and by doing it non doing will flower. By doing it you will be able to relax. And when the relaxation is total, truth simply descends. It is a visit of the beyond. Sat means truth; bodhi means enlightenment – true enlightenment, true awakening. Man is fast asleep. Man’s whole life is a long, long journey in dreams. Even while we think we are awake, we are not. With open eyes we are still dreaming; a thousand and one dreams are going on inside the mind. Thoughts are nothing but a translation of dreams into words, just as dreams are nothing but translations of thoughts into pictures. Dreaming is a primal language, a primitive language. And thoughts are more sophisticated, more cultured, more dressed up. But deep down it is the same thing: we are dreaming in sleep; we are dreaming when we think we are awake. The dreaming stops only when we become so alert that thinking disappears. And that moment is of true enlightenment: a state of consciousness without any content, just pure awareness, nothing to see, no thought, no dream, no memory. The mirror is completely empty, nothing is reflected in it. That is the ultimate goal of sannyas. And once you have known that you have known all that is worth knowing. Once you have known that you have known love, you have known bliss; you have known God, you have known freedom. You have known all that is worth knowing. And that knowledge is not ordinary knowledge, it is not just information. It is your own realization, it is a revelation. All doubts disappear, just as darkness disappears when the sun rises. When your enlightenment has happened all doubts disappear, simply disappear – not that they are answered, they are not found at all. Real trust arises only when you have experienced truth. Otherwise what you call belief and faith, these are all bogus things. These are pseudo-entities to befool people. These are the opium for the people. My work here consists not in indoctrination. I don’t want to give you any doctrine about truth. I don’t want to give you any teaching; I am not a teacher. I simply want to hit you so hard that you have to wake up! My work consists of shaking, shocking, and all kinds of devices in which you can be pulled out of your long long state of sleep and dreaming. It can be done only through devices. It is not an intellectual work; it is existential. It cannot be done by analysis. The analysis will remain intellectual, will remain a mind-trip. But a certain context can be created, a certain space can be created, where it can happen. That space is sannyas. Sannyas is nothing but a gesture from your side that if I hit you, you will thank me!


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Anand means bliss; Pujan means worship. Bliss is worship. To be blissful is to be prayerful. To have the capacity to celebrate life is religiousness. But down the ages the so-called religions have done Just the opposite: they have made religion a very serious, somber affair. They have made it almost pathological, morbid. They have made it utterly negative: life denying, love denying, bliss-denying. Their God has been the God of denial. Deny, renounce, condemn – that has been the foundation up to now. And because of this the earth has remained irreligious, because very few people can manage to be so pathological as religion has been demanding. Only a few sadists, a few masochists were eligible. The sinner and the healthier part of humanity has remained unconcerned, indifferent to the temples, churches, the priests, for a certain reason: the religion that was taught was not healthy, it was not wholesome. It was a kind of disease. It has appeal only for the wrong people. Only very few people, who can be counted on fingers, were healthy and religious – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna, a Kabir – only here and there, far and few in between. Otherwise the greater part, ninety-nine point nine percent of the so-called religious basically needed no religion but psychoanalysis. They needed psychological treatment. Maybe electro shock would have helped them more than all their worship and prayer and God. I teach a totally different kind of religion: I teach a religion of love, a religion which affirms life, a religion of yes, a religion which is not afraid of the world, not afraid of the body, not afraid of matter; a religion which is not afraid at all, a religion which trusts in God so deeply that there is no need to renounce anything. One can celebrate, one can rejoice! God has to found in the world because that is the only place he can be found, there is no other place. And God has to be found in your ordinary life because your so-called ordinary life is permeated with 88

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God. There is nothing ordinary. Everything is extraordinary because everything is in some way or other part of God. So I don’t teach denial, I don’t teach condemnation; I don’t teach no-saying, I don’t teach escape. I teach: live in the world and yet live divinely. Anand means bliss; Nartano means dance – a dance of bliss. Life is meant to be a dance of bliss. If it is not then we don’t know how to live it. If it is not then we have gone astray. If it is not then we are doing something suicidal. Man is not born to be miserable. Nobody is born to be miserable – no animal, no bird, no tree. Why should man be in such misery? – misery is an unnatural state. But there are reasons: misery has a few things which bliss cannot supply. And one of the greatest things that misery can supply is the ego, which bliss takes away. And because we want this ego so deeply we cling to it at any cost – we are ready to suffer hell. Somebody asked George Bernard Shaw ”Where would you like to go when you die, to heaven or to hell?” He said ”It doesn’t matter where I go. The only thing that I am concerned about is whether I am going to be first there or not. If I am first in hell it’s perfectly okay; if I am number two in heaven it is hell for me.” What he is saying is true about every human being, every human mind. The ego is possible only in the ocean of misery. The more miserable you are, the more the ego becomes strengthened. It lives on it, thrives on it. Misery is its food, anxiety its nourishment, anguish its very base. So those who want to remain separate, those who want to be unique, those who want to be special, superior to others, holier-than-thou are bound to remain miserable. The key to bliss is very simple: drop the ego and all misery disappears – because the basic cause disappears, the root disappears. And then there arises great bliss in your own being. It wells up from your own resources; it is not something that comes from outside, it is something that arises in you. It is you! It is your very being. And then life is a dance, a song, a laughter, a love affair. And to be able to dance, to sing, to love, to laugh, is to come closer to God. My God is a dancer, a singer, a poet, a musician, a lover. My God is totally different from the God of Plato. On the doors of his Academy, Plato has written that God is a mathematician. If you don’t know mathematics please don’t enter here. My God is not a mathematician. God a mathematician? It is simply a contradiction in terms! God is not a calculator. And mathematics can be done by a computer far more efficiently than by God. He is not needed at all! If God is a mathematician then he is the most perfect computer, that’s all. The heart is not involved. To me, God has no head. He is heart all over: from the toe to the head he is just heart, a heart pulsating, a heart vibrating, a heart dancing. And to come to this heart of the universe, closer to this heart of the universe you have to learn something of the same quality. Dance a little more sing a little more. Be playful! Don’t take life serious-ly. The ego always takes everything seriously. Just Around the Corner

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Sannyas is entering into the world of non-seriousness. into the world of laughter, into the world of poetry, into the world of paradox, into the world of contradictions – because God is so vast he contains all contradictions. He is not a logical syllogism: he is an ecstatic expression of joy.


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Anand means bliss, Anna means grace – grace that is a byproduct of bliss. Grace follows bliss as a shadow. One cannot achieve grace directly, there is no way to it. It comes via bliss. If somebody tries to be graceful without being blissful he will only be pretending, he will be at the most a good actor. But his being will remain ugly, graceless. Deep down he will remain animalistic; on the surface humanity will be just a very thin coat. It can disappear very easily; the animal will erupt. But that’s what society has been teaching people to do: just have a thin layer of grace on yourself; that’s enough for the social world, society demands not more than that. It keeps things going easily, smoothly. It is like a lubricant: it helps people not to come into too much conflict. It is etiquette, manners, civilization, culture, but it is not true grace. True grace comes only when bliss has happened. True grace is possible only when one is a Buddha or a Jesus, not before that. Then it is not a character, then it is not something imposed upon you. Then it is something that radiates; from the innermost recesses of your being it blooms. It is a fragrance of your soul. Deva means divine; Sonia means wisdom – divine wisdom. Knowledge is human. Man can attain to knowledge through experience, through studies, through observation. But wisdom cannot be attained. No effort can give you wisdom., no experience either. Wisdom comes from the beyond. It comes to those who are pure in heart. That is another meaning of Sonia: purity of the heart. Wisdom arrives only when the heart is as innocent as a child, as innocent as a flower.

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And the innocent heart knows how to trust, because the innocent heart cannot doubt. It is simply impossible for the innocent to doubt. Only the knowledgeable doubts; the more knowledge, the more doubt. And finally knowledge leads into madness and nowhere else. But the innocent of heart, the pure of heart have no doubts. They simply trust life. That is the third meaning of Sonia: faith in God. It is one of the most beautiful words, with three meanings: wisdom, purity of the heart, faith in God. But those three meanings are only apparently three: deep down they are three faces of one experience. This is the real inner trinity. If purity is there, there is faith, there is wisdom. They all come together; they are inseparable. And they are the greatest things one can experience, one can be. Nothing is beyond them. Remember these three things and slowly slowly become aware of how these three things can’t be protected... because we all bring them with our birth and slowly slowly we lose them. The whole art of religion is how not to lose that which we have brought from God’s home. It is not a learning; it is a remembering. It is just being a little more watchful so one does not diffuse one’s qualities. One has to be careful not to imbibe the opposites of these qualities. For example: when doubt comes don’t support it, don’t feed it, don’t cooperate with it. Just let it be there and watch. Be separate and unidentified and soon it will be gone. And when it is gone great trust will arise in you. When some impure thought moves in the mind be watchful. There is no need to fight, because fight is also in a subtle way a cooperation. It is paying attention; attention is food. Just watch it unconcerned, as if it is not happening to you but to somebody else. Create a distance between you and the thought and distance kills it. Don’t become too greedy for knowledge, for information; rather move into other dimensions Those other dimensions are poetry, music, dance, painting. Rather than becoming knowledgeable become creative. Annamaria. Anna means many things: it means grace, it means prayer, it means worship. I would like you to remember prayer. Maria also means many things: a wished-for child, bitterness, rebellion. I would like you to remember rebellion. Your full name will mean prayer rebellion. Prayer is rebellion, the greatest rebellion possible, because prayer is a one-hundred-and-eightydegree turn, neither less nor more. It is turning inwards; it is becoming other-worldly. It is searching into one’s own subjectivity. It is groping into the darkness of one’s interiority. It is going to the very source of one’s being, to the very roots, because only by going to the very roots of one’s being does one come to know oneself. And to know oneself is the most fundamental truth of life. Those who don’t know themselves know nothing, and those who know themselves know everything. That single knowing is so revolutionary, it brings such a radical change. It transforms one’s whole life. it changes one, one’s relationship to people, to the world, to everything. Hence I call it the greatest rebellion. It makes you for the first time an individual. It gives you integrity, a center. For the first time you start functioning from your innermost core and not from the periphery. For the first Just Around the Corner

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time you are not functioning from the head but from the heart. And to function from the heart is to know what beauty is, what blessing is, what benediction is. It is only in those moments of bliss, beauty, and benediction that one becomes aware of God. If one knows oneself, God is; if one does not know oneself, God is not. God is not a hypothesis: it is the ultimate experience of one’s eternity, of one’s immortality, of one’s beginningless, endless, existence. And the miracle is done by prayer. But by prayer I don’t mean the ordinary prayer: bowing to a god in a church, in a temple, reciting certain words. Prayer is not a ritual, it has nothing to do with i words. It is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan. It cannot be labeled. It is a silence, primordial silence, just utter silence. It is not an address to God. How can you address God? – you don’t know him. It is not calling for God. How can you call God? – you don’t know him. It is not praising God. How can you praise God? – you don’t know him. Then what is it? It is simply being silent before this mysterious existence, in wonder, in awe. And those moments of silence full of wonder and awe are prayer. Prem means love: Wilfried means resolution. Love is the greatest resolution in life, the greatest decision. The mind is always divided. The mind is always either-or, to be or not to be. The mind is always hesitant, it is incapable of decision. It is impotent as far as decisiveness is concerned. That’s why the greatest thinkers are the most indecisive people in the world. This is a calamity, because the fools are very decisive. They don’t hesitate, they simply enter where even angels are afraid to enter. The Adolf Hitlers and Josef Stalins and Mao Tse-tungs are not afraid to decide. They don’t bother, they simply act: they act first and then they think. But then it is pointless. The greatest thinkers – people like Immanuel Kant or Hegel or Kierkegaard – they cannot decide. Kierkegaard gave one of his most famous books the name ”Either Or”. It became so famous that people started calling Kierkegaard ”Either Or”. Whenever he would pass through the streets, children would gather and shout ”Either Or! Either Or!” And it was true in a sense: for his whole life he remained in that state of either-or. He loved a woman and loved her tremendously, but could not decide... For three years the love affair was prolonged but he could not decide whether to get married or not. Out of sheer desperation the woman left him. And he suffered for his whole life because he had really loved the woman; he could not love anybody else again. But he knew that he was responsible: he was indecisive. The mind cannot decide, so either the mindless people act... Or there is another kind of person: the heartful person who acts. If the mindless person acts he creates misery for others and for himself. If the heartful person acts his act is a kind of prayer; his act brings benediction to the world That’s what I mean: be decisive, be resolute, not out of mindlessness but out of heartfulness, out of love. If resolution arises out of love it has tremendous beauty in it. Resolution in itself is of great importance but even of far more importance is the source from where it comes. It should come from the heart. It should come out of love, not out of logic.


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And that’s what sannyas is all about: living a life of resolution out of the heart, taking all the risk, going into all kinds of insecurities, not out of foolishness but out of a great love for existence. And then whatsoever you do is right. Love is right and it makes everything right. Anand means blissful; Yugmo means ultimate union. Man is suffering from separation, separation ’I’ from God, separation from existence. Man has become a cocoon, a capsule enclosed in his own ego. The ego is like an egg. It has become a wall between you and all that is, that’s the root cause of misery. We cannot enjoy the sun and the moon and the stars. The world is always in a celebration but we are enclosed in our own darkness. The bird has to come out of the egg. The bird has to learn how to break the egg. The bird has to gather courage because the egg confers great security, safety, comfort. The bird has to learn the joys of insecurity, the joys of the open sky. They are dangerous, certainly they are dangerous! There is a risk, it is a great risk. But life grows only through risk; life becomes more and more meaningful only through more and more dangers. As you move towards the peak of life, you are moving into great dangers. If you fall from there you will be gone forever. Hence many have decided just to grope and crawl in the dark valley, never to bother about climbing the mountains. Many have decided not to use their wings; they have almost forgotten that they have wings. They never look at the sun, at the moon. They never aspire to the distant star. Sannyas is an aspiration to the most distant star. Call it God, samadhi, bliss, the ultimate union, it all simply means the same: that we have to drop our separation and become one again with existence. Then bliss simply happens; it simply showers. You are bathed in it!


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Prem means love; Helmut means great courage. Love is the greatest courage in life. It really needs guts to be in love. It needs a capacity to die into the love, to disappear into love. It needs courage because the ego has to be surrendered. Hence many people would like to love and be loved, but cannot dare. Their basic problem is not love; their basic problem is that they are cowards. They go on asking how to be loving, how to love, how to be loved. They should ask how to be courageous. They are asking a wrong question. And of course it is the greatest courage to surrender the ego. Love means that the other becomes more important than you, and that is very difficult for the ego to conceive: the other becoming more important than you? The ego would like you to become more important than the other. The ego would like to dominate, possess, and love requires that you be possessed. And both the lovers have to surrender, so ultimately the surrender is not to the other but to some unknown force called love. Both surrender to that unknown god called love. Nobody dominates, nobody possesses, but both are possessed. This union that happens through love gives the first glimpse of prayer. Those who are fortunate enough to love are bound to stumble upon the world of prayer sooner or later. Only lovers can become religious. Those who have missed love will also miss religion. They have not taken even the first step, how can they reach the goal? Anand means bliss; Satgyan means true wisdom – bliss arises only out of true wisdom. And the wisdom is true if it arises in you. If it comes from the outside, through scriptures, through words, 95

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then it is not true Then it is mere knowledge, not wisdom at all. It it is borrowed it is bound to be untrue because one of the fundamental qualities of truth is that it is untransferable. One can know it but one cannot make it known to others. One can show it but one cannot say it. We can indicate the moon, but it is not expressed. And all the words are at the most reflections, pictures not true reality. You can go to the Himalayas and see and feel, or you can look through an album of pictures of those same mountains. The album represents the scriptures. All scriptures are maps, but remember that no map is the territory. So there is no way to learn truth from others. The greatest problem for the seeker is, then what to do? Learning is not the way; unlearning is the way. One has to unlearn whatsoever one has known from others. One has to empty oneself totally. In that state of emptiness truth arises; it is born in you. When truth is felt in the deepest core of your being you become wise. And it brings bliss, just as a byproduct, as a consequence. One need not make bliss the goal; the goal is true wisdom. Bliss simply comes with it, in the bargain. Anand means bliss; Svabhavo means self-nature. Bliss is not something foreign; it does not come from the outside. It grows in you, it is your very nature. To be miserable is somehow to be artificial. Misery is an acquired thing. It is going against nature; it is something learned. It looks very silly to think that people learn how to miserable, but it is so. Bliss needs no learning. We are born as bliss. All that is needed is dropping of the strategies that create misery. All that is needed is to stop creating more miseries for yourself. Just that much negative effort is enough, and suddenly bliss arises. It is a gift from the whole or from God. And it is already there, just blocked by wrong upbringing, wrong conditioning, wrong attitudes, theories, ideologies. Somebody has become a Christian, now he is bound to remain miserable. Somebody has become a Hindu, he is bound to remain miserable. Religious ideologies or political ideologies all create misery because they all try to enslave you. And only a miserable person can be enslaved. A blissful person is naturally rebellious. His bliss gives him freedom to act, to think, to live according to his own being. The society is very much afraid of blissful people. It wants to make everybody a cripple. It does not want you to be able to dance. Dance seems to be dangerous to it. It does not want you to know how to sing because the heart that sings sooner or later would ask for the whole sky. He cannot be contained. He will break through all the barriers. The heart that can sing will sooner or later become aware of his wings; and he would like to go on the ultimate flight, the flight towards truth, God, nirvana. And the society does not want you to look at the sky and the stars. It wants you to remain crawling on the earth, in the mud, wallowing in misery. Then you are ready to be exploited, then you can be reduced to machines, then you can be used as means. Bliss brings freedom, and hence bliss is the most dangerous thing in the world. People killed Socrates because he was a blissful man. And they killed him because not only was he blissful, he was making efforts and creating a certain space for others to be blissful too. They crucified Jesus because his bliss was becoming contagioUs. They can do the same with anybody. Just Around the Corner

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To be blissful in this miserable world is taking the greatest risk, but that’s what sannyas is all about. Take the risk! – it is worth taking. Sat means being, the innermost truth of your existence, your ultimate interiority. And prem means love – love that arises out of centering, love that overflows you when you have attained to your being, love not as a relationship but as a state of being. Love that is a relationship is not much of a love. It is the lowest kind and the ugliest too. It is exploitative. It is very mean because it is jealous. It is very egoistic because it is possessive. It is basically an ego-trip because it wants to dominate. It is violent because it reduces the other to a thing, a commodity. And love as a relationship brings only misery and nothing else. It promises much but those promises are never fulfilled. In the very nature of things they cannot be fulfilled because both are hoping that the other is going to give something that they don’t have. Now, you cannot give something that you don’t have. Two beggars begging from each other, that is the state of the so-called lovers. Both are utterly empty. There is no bliss in their being and they are pretending to share that which is not there in the first place. But they are hoping that by pretending the other may give. And the same is the state of the other. Hence every love affair ends in frustration. But if one is alert and aware one can learn much out of the frustration. One can learn a new kind of love that is not a demand, that is not a begging. One can start moving into meditation deeper and deeper. Rather than going into the other one starts going into oneself because the other has failed so now there is nowhere to go except into one’s own being. And then the miracle happens one day. Sud-denly a fountain is found. The bliss that you were hankering for is already there in you. And once it has started flowing it is an inexhaustible source. Now you can give, now you can share. Now you have to share because by sharing your bliss will go on growing. That is the state of love. Only a man like Buddha, Jesus, Socrates can give this kind of love. Nothing is asked in return. Then love has a beauty of its own; it is divine. I teach that love. But that love also grows in the mud of this world so I am not against the ordinary love. I am all for it because only out of this mud can the lotus grow.


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